Pansy Perkins, Chapter 2

Here, by popular demand (thank you, my lone but enthusiastic reader!), is chapter 2 of the book. I welcome comments, especially enthusiastic ones and ones that point out inconsistencies or oversights. If you think the story has potential, by all means help me find a publisher.

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Chapter 2

Eliza could hardly believe her luck. She and Pansy sat in the back of the car, a bit squashed by the softer luggage, which hadn’t fit into the very back, and giggled so often that Astrid kept glaring at them from the seat before. Pansy suspected that Astrid was just peeved at not being able to bring a friend of her own, and said so. Astrid shouted, “A fat lot you know!” and whipped back around to face the front, but she didn’t glare at Eliza and Pansy anymore. That suited Pansy just fine, if Astrid was bent on being all prickly anyway. Clarence was busy reading some book about knights and dragons and didn’t seem to hear the girls at all.

Around lunchtime they stopped and picknicked at a rest area tucked a little way off the main road. By then they had left the big highway and been traveling on smaller roads for an hour or two, and the weather was really fine, and Mama had made an absolutely splendid lunch. That used to make Eliza a little weepy, years ago, that Pansy’s Mama made such delicious lunches, but now she just enjoyed it. Truth be told, Eliza could hardly remember her own Mama now, and it didn’t seem so unnatural anymore that it was just she and Papa in the little house on Grant Street.

Clarence stopped reading long enough to fire a few pickle slices at the girls, and they fired tomato wedges back, laughing and snorting and eventually tackling each other in the grass while the grownups finished eating. Papa generally didn’t tolerate such acting up at mealtimes, but they were out in the open on a beautiful summer’s day, and that always put him in a generous mood. So Pansy and Eliza and Clarence took full advantage of it, Pansy ripping her right pants knee (Mama just sighed; Pansy had a dresser full of pants with one bad knee, always the right one) and Eliza and Clarence rather greener from the grass.

Astrid, uncharacteristically, didn’t join in, and Clarence yelled, “Hey, you old goose, what’s holding you up?” Pansy and Clarence fairly fell out with shock when Astrid glared and threw her entire sandwich at them (falling short a few yards), then stalked off to sit in the car. Pansy glanced at her mother, but Mama was calmly eating and talking with Papa as if nothing had just happened.

“Rather big bee up her butt,” muttered Clarence, and Pansy guffawed. Even Eliza couldn't help laughing, though she was uncertain she should. After all, she was a guest, and she hadn’t gotten over the feeling that it was too good to be true, that someone (she imagined it would be Pansy’s father) might suddenly turn with a start and say, “My goodness! Eliza Higgins! How did you get into this car? Turn around at once, Milly, we’ve got to get her back home.” So Eliza didn’t want to aggravate Astrid into anything that might get Eliza noticed.

Presently they packed up and everyone loaded back into the car, a task made a bit more difficult by Astrid’s stubborn refusal to move over and let the girls crawl into the back row. Astrid hadn’t actually refused so much as just not moved; she had her head down on her arms, leaning on the window, and when Pansy’d knocked on the window glass Astrid hadn’t even budged. Well, Astrid could mope all the way to Gramma’s house if she wanted to, but Pansy was jolly well going to enjoy the trip. So she just looked at Eliza and shrugged, and the girls walked around to crawl in behind Clarence.

Several hours later, after three more stops (a pee break, and then an early dinner, and shortly thereafter another pee break for Pansy, who had forgotten to go at the restaurant; Mama just sighed), the car pulled to a stop and the girls looked out with great excitement.

“We’re here!” shouted Pansy. “Really and truly here, for the whole summer!” Eliza grabbed Pansy in a fiercely joyful hug.

Papa opened the door for Astrid, then for Clarence, and helped the girls out. Mama started in on the luggage. Pansy saw Gramma come out onto the front porch—it was surely the most marvelous front porch anywhere—and she ran up the steps, bounding into Gramma, who laughed and swept her up for a big kiss. Eliza was feeling a bit shy and just stood at the bottom of the steps, not sure whether to help Mr. and Mrs. Perkins with the luggage or greet old Mrs. Perkins on the front porch. But then old Mrs. Perkins put Pansy down and said, “Eliza Higgins! It’s a pleasure to see you again. I’m delighted you could come for the summer. Come on up here and let’s get you two some lemonade and a cookie. Ivy baked them this afternoon. Yes, Clarence, you (and Astrid) too.” She smiled warmly at Eliza, but not stupidly—you know how some grownups do—and Eliza began to remember that singularly wonderful feeling of being treated like a real person by an adult. That was something special about Pansy’s Gramma, Eliza thought, it was part of what made a whole summer here so unimaginably delicious.

After several cookies (Ivy was fantastic with cookies, thought Eliza, and wondered if Ivy might make even a spinach cookie worth eating), Pansy and Eliza had lugged their bags up into the third-floor back guest room. It was the largest of the bedrooms, even larger than Gramma’s, with a giant four-poster bed, two ancient wardrobes, an old but very comfortable sitting chair, and a divan. The girls set immediately to exploring the room—Pansy had, of course, seen it before, but she’d never had it for her own. It was always for Mama and Papa, but now that Eliza was along, and she and Pansy would be staying for the whole summer, Gramma had said that it was the sensible choice. The girls had immediately agreed. Even Astrid hadn’t gotten upset about that.

Perkins House (it was so old, it was capitalized) had four floors—five, if you counted the basement, which was more of a root cellar—and scads of guest rooms, now that the five Perkins children were grown and Gramma had the house to herself. (Well, excepting Ivy and Lucy and Gerald, the gardener.) The back of the house looked out over the Perkins land, a great expanse of flowers and vegetables, climbing trellises, stone paths, the occasional wooden bench, giant magnolias with their marvelous hiding places, and, further out, a field. At the far edge of the field was the forest, not a very big one, but large enough to satisfy one’s sense of adventure. Past the forest was a stream which meandered a mile or so westward until it reached the Owen pond, and across the stream began the Mulross farm.

Only old Mr. Mulross was still there, and he didn’t have anyone like Ivy and Lucy (or a gardener, like Gerald, which was evident from his yard). Eliza knew from Pansy that Gramma often sent Ivy with food for Mr. Mulross, and once in a while Gramma herself would go for a visit, Lucy in tow for a bit of surreptitious tidying up. Of course, Gramma didn’t go through the yard to get there; she went along the road, which had been recently paved (before that, it had been dirt, and prone to nasty ruts after a good rain).

Pansy had only been to Mr. Mulross’ once with Gramma. It had smelled dusty and not particularly interesting. She’d had to sit with Gramma on an ancient sofa in the drawing room, and every time she’d tried to wriggle away for some exploring Gramma had gently put her hand on Pansy’s leg, so that Pansy knew she’d better just stay put. Gramma listened patiently as Mr. Mulross wandered from topic to topic. Pansy kicked her heels on the sofa, sending up little plumes of dust, until Gramma moved her foot behind Pansy’s. Pansy was not anxious to get back to Mr. Mulross’ after that.

Right now, Pansy and Eliza couldn’t see anything out the back windows—it was already past bedtime—so they turned their attention to the huge wardrobes. There was a large, richly carved key for each one, and the girls spent a bit of time admiring these. Then they tried the key for one in the door of the other, and then for fun in the bedroom door (it didn’t fit, as I’m sure you suspected). After that they got busy inspecting the contents of the wardrobes, which were, I’m sorry to say, not very exciting, though Pansy did find an old dress buckle.

Eliza woke frightfully early the next morning; the sun was just coming up and it was beginning to lighten the view out the back windows. Eliza took one of the old quilts out of the chest at the end of the four-poster and pulled it over to the window seat. She watched as everything in the yard changed from a single bleak grey into the faintest of colors, then brightened. It was especially fantastic in the flower gardens. She saw Ivy come out and snip something off one of the plants in the container garden near the larder. Gerald emerged from the tool shed and began pruning a shrub near the gardens’ edge.

Eliza gave a start when Pansy appeared beside her, holding two mugs of coffee-and-milk, rich, creamy, and sweet.

“Sorry, Lize, didn’t mean to frighten you,” Pansy said, taking a big slurp of coffee. “Got these from Ivy. You really didn’t see me leave the room?”

“Heavens, no!” Eliza answered. “I was all caught up in the comings and goings of the gardener and the cook, there outside.” She said this last with great intrigue, as though there were Something Going On. But there wasn’t; that was mainly to get back at Pansy for so successfully scaring her. Pansy didn’t fall for it, however.

“How about let’s get dressed and go exploring outside,” Pansy suggested. “We can grab breakfast from Ivy on the way out.”

Eliza thought that was a splendid idea and in no time the two were deep in the garden, munching happily on ham biscuits, scouting out interesting holes and branches low enough to climb, and getting thoroughly grungy in the process.

It went on like that for nearly the whole first week; soon the girls knew the garden inside out. It wasn’t exactly as Pansy had imagined it, though, all those summers she had been at home while first Astrid and then Clarence had been off at Gramma’s. She’d expected more help from those two, for one thing. But Clarence had brought a whole stack of books, and Astrid was inexplicably mopey. Good thing Eliza could come, Pansy thought more than once, or I’d have been left without anyone. Pansy was very curious and very brave, you see, but she was also a people person, and she didn’t like an adventure half so much if no one was there to share it.

So Eliza and Pansy kept exploring on their own, and mostly they saw Clarence and Astrid at mealtimes, and mostly Clarence tried to wing peas at them, and mostly Astrid just scowled.

All that changed on a Tuesday. It was raining cats and dogs when Eliza and Pansy woke that morning, which didn’t bother them at all; they hadn’t explored even a tenth of the house, so there was no lack of interesting things to discover. To make it even better, Clarence had apparently had enough of books, and he joined the girls after lunch.

That made it possible to play a game of Three Man Round, a sort of hide-and-seek tag that keeps on going as long as you like: One person finds the second, who must then find the third, who goes back and finds the first, who has by then had time to hide again. (It could, as you may have noticed, be Four Man Round or Five Man Round or Ten Man Round, but there were three Perkins children, and therefore it had always, at the Perkins home, been Three Man Round. Astrid had invented it—or at least given it its name.)

Perkins House was a perfect place for Three Man Round, being full of staircases and doors and alcoves and nooks and piles of blankets. With so many interesting places, finding your man took a long time (this was aided in part by the interestingness of the house, which meant that sometimes the seeker got a little sidetracked).

Pansy was First Man, which meant right now that she was hiding, waiting for Clarence to find Eliza so that Eliza could get around to finding her again. Pansy knew she had a while, so she wasn’t hiding very well—if Eliza had been in the room, she’d have seen Pansy immediately—but she figured on hearing Clarence give a victory shout when he found Eliza to warn her to get back under cover.

Pansy was so absorbed in the letter that she didn’t hear Clarence’s victory shout; in fact, she didn’t realize Eliza was looking for her until she stood right over her and gave her leg a little kick to show it wasn’t fun to find her this way.

“Oh! Eliza,” Pansy said. “Look at this.”

“Pansy,” Eliza frowned, “you’re supposed to be hiding.”

“I know, Lize, sorry about that, but look! I couldn’t help it once I found the letter.” Pansy pointed to the small, lavender-colored envelope with a real wax seal.

Eliza got down for a closer look. “What’s in it?” she asked, picking it up and turning it around. It was covered with some kind of interesting design.

“I thought it was just an old letter, you know,” Pansy explained, “like from some old army husband to his wife, my great grandparents or something, it looks terribly old.” Eliza agreed about that; it did seem worn and of a kind of paper she’d never seen.

“But it isn’t,” Pansy went on. “It’s much more exciting than that. It’s a secret love letter.”

Eliza opened the envelope and began to read. Dearest Rupert, the letter started.

“See?” Pansy pointed at the name. “Rupert. Who ever names somebody Rupert anymore? This letter’s got to be really old.” Eliza waved at Pansy to be quiet. Rupert wasn’t a very exciting name.

I haven’t got very long before Mother comes back and wonders where I am. Well, that’s more intriguing, Eliza thought, glancing with raised eyebrows at Pansy, who just nodded and said “keep reading.”

I’m sitting on this bejeweled wonder you made for me, on a perfect spring day, and I’ve never felt so happy in my life.

Pansy and Eliza exchanged glances. Ooooh, a bejeweled wonder! Maybe they could find it! It must be hidden somewhere in the house, and they could search high and low for it, and when they found it Gramma Perkins would be so pleased because it was a family heirloom that had been missing for generations and it was worth a million dollars and now Pansy and Eliza were going to be famous and be invited to go sleuthing for bejeweled wonders all over the world. “Shush,” Eliza said to Pansy, “and let me finish reading the letter.”

I wish I could shout it out for the whole world to hear, but I can’t. I can’t even let Father hear it; especially not Father. He would put an end to it, and I know he would send you away. So we will have to keep our secret, and keep meeting in little stolen odds and ends of time, which is hard to bear; but this hidden garden reminds me of you.

Eliza clasped her hand to her mouth in delight. Pansy nodded in glee. Oh! A hidden garden. The bejeweled wonder was in a hidden garden? Buried treasure!

Even when you are not with me, I see your touch all around me, the violets and pansies and forget-me-nots, and my beautiful bench. Oh, Rupert! I’ll figure out a way to soften Father’s heart. I have to, for time is running short. I have done my best to hide it, but soon our secret will be out, like it or not. Father knows you are a good and honest man. When he sees the inevitability of our marriage, he won’t refuse.

“Pretty interesting, huh?” Pansy said.

“Well, that’s an understatement,” Eliza replied. “It’s frightfully exciting.”

Until tonight, my dearest love. Under the stars and the moon and the silent cloak of night, here in our garden.

Your beloved

Maud

“Oh, Pansy!” Eliza sighed. “Who do you think she was? Your great-great-grandmother?”

“Beats me,” said Pansy. “I never heard of any Mauds in the family before. Oh! Clarence! I’d forgotten all about him.” She laughed. “He must be getting fidgety by now. Come on, let’s go find him and show him the letter.”

Late that night the three children hunkered down in Pansy and Eliza’s room, studying the letter by flashlight. They hadn’t dared to tell Astrid about it yet. In her present mood it seemed better to wait until they had figured out where to dig for the bejeweled wonder before trying to get her to join them.

“Because she has to come along,” said Pansy. “She loves romantic stories. She just can’t refuse one with a mystery attached.”

“Don’t worry, Pans,” soothed Clarence. “She’ll come along. You know Astrid; she loves a good adventure as much as we do. She’ll snap out of this funk of hers and be the first one out the starting gate.”

“Let’s get started on the garden,” urged Eliza. “Think now; where could it be?”

Clarence and Pansy furrowed their brows and got down to thinking.

“Well, it isn’t anwhere near the house, because we’ve spent hours and hours rooting around outside and haven’t found anything remotely like a hidden garden,” Pansy declared.

“That makes sense,” Clarence nodded. “After all, Maud is meeting her clandestine lover in a secret garden, so it can’t be right under her parents’ nose, can it?”

“Well, where can you hide a garden?” Pansy wondered. “You can’t just plop it down in the fields. Anybody could see it.”

“It’ll be all overgrown, and we won’t recognize it at first, until we see some purple blossoms peeking out from under a lot of weeds,” Eliza ventured.

Clarence frowned. “Well, if Gerald’s found it, we’re all out of luck. He’ll have whipped it back into shape and we’ll never recognize it.”

Pansy and Eliza sighed.

Several hours later the children had agreed to a scouting mission the next morning, first thing, to get a better lay of the farther land. With a solemn promise to wake each other as soon as it got light, Clarence returned to his room (just down the hall, fortunately) and the girls tucked into bed, falling asleep almost at once.

Pansy Perkins

Well, after much wiffling and waffling, I've decided to publish parts of the children's book I'm working on to this blog. If Orson Scott Card can do it without people ripping off his ideas for their own books, I figure, then so can I. The parts are still in draft, mind you, so there will be typos and awkward bits.

Here's chapter one of Pansy Perkins (working title).

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Chapter 1

Pansy Perkins was so excited she could hardly manage to stuff the egg muffin from breakfast into her pocket and get out the door in one piece. At last she was old enough to accompany Astrid and Clarence for that most glorious of vacations, an entire summer at Gramma’s house. She’d been plenty of times for a weekend or even a whole week, but now she was ten, and that meant she could finally leave nasty, boring old Filchinburg for twelve weeks of exploring, and eating jam-drenched muffins outside by the pond, and staying up super-late to read without ever having to worry about someone coming to take the flashlight away. The only thing that wasn’t marvelous about it was leaving Eliza behind.

Pansy broke off bits of muffin and shoved them into her mouth as she ran pell-mell out the garden gate, across the Macreadys’ lawn (careful to jump the tomato plants, no sense getting Mrs. Macready upset so close to Leaving Day!), and toward Eliza’s house just across the ditch. Eliza was already waiting for her, umbrella in hand, galoshes on (Pansy’d forgotten hers, but Mama was used to that by now, so it wouldn’t matter).

“Muffin?” Pansy asked, extending a rather squashed and greasy-looking clump of egg and bread to Eliza.

“No, thanks, I’ve got one,” Eliza answered, indicating a squashed and greasy-looking clump of her own, this one apparently containing ham and some kind of green vegetable. “Spinach,” Eliza grimaced, answering Pansy’s puzzled glance. “Papa is on another health kick and we’ve got spinach nearly every morning for breakfast. Spinach pancakes, spinach toast, spinach and eggs. Bah.” She shuddered.

“Spinach jam?” asked Pansy, curious.

“Ugh, no!” Eliza gave Pansy a horrified look, and the two girls burst into laughter. “Don’t mention that one within earshot, Pans, he might just try it.”

They walked along the ditch, Pansy kicking the occasional pebble sideways into it, Eliza picking bits of spinach out of her muffin. After a while Pansy said, “Well, tomorrow’s the Big Day.”

Eliza was preoccupied by a particularly engaging piece of spinach and didn’t answer immediately. Maybe she didn’t know what Pansy meant, so Pansy tried again, with more detail. “So, Lize, I’m leaving for Gramma’s house tomorrow.”

Pansy had never seen spinach command such attention before now. It seemed pretty strange, really, when you considered that Eliza didn’t even like spinach all that much.

“Eliza!” she shouted. “Tomorrow I’m leaving! I’ll be gone for twelve whole weeks! Don’t you think we should do something special today?”

Much to Pansy’s surprise, Eliza just shrugged and said, “If you want to,” in a small, dull voice.

“What’s bothering you?” Pansy asked. Eliza shot her a glance that meant, Are you really that thick?

“What do you think, Pans?” she finally shouted, getting fierce with the spinach bits. “Just that you’ll be gone for the whole summer, having a marvelous time, with adventures and late nights and romping around outside for hours, finding who knows what kinds of interesting and unusual things, and then eating dinner”—Eliza had eaten at Pansy’s Gramma’s house once before, and had never forgotten it—“and I’ll be stuck here, doing nothing exciting, with no one to play with except the Farkinsworth girls.”

Pansy grimaced right along with Eliza at this last bit. The Farkinsworth girls weren’t bad, but they were boring, without any proper imagination at all. They only ever wanted to dress up dolls, or run trains around a track, or paint pictures that only needed one piece of paper, or go wading through puddles with galoshes on. They didn’t like exploring at all. They certainly wouldn’t be any help to Eliza in getting the Cave all fixed up.

“Oh,” said Pansy. She couldn’t think of anything else. Eliza was quite right.

“How’s this—,” she said a moment later, in a fit of inspiration. Eliza looked at her hopefully.

“Let’s try to get you out to Gramma’s for a visit, at least a week, maybe even a whole month,” Pansy cried. “Wait! What if we could get you out there for the whole summer!” She punched Eliza playfully with her fist, but Pansy was rather excited and it stung a bit. Eliza liked the idea, though, so she didn’t say anything about the punch, but asked instead, “Do you think I could?”

It might do to explain here that, though he was partial to spinach breakfasts, Eliza’s Papa was a very understanding Papa, so it was an entirely reasonable proposition that he would let Eliza go off to Pansy’s Gramma’s for the summer. In fact, Eliza’s Papa had eaten at Gramma’s once too, the same dinner that Eliza had eaten there, and he had never forgotten it either.

At any rate, Eliza and Pansy were now furiously extending and adapting their plan to rescue Eliza from a dreary summer of Farkinsworths. By the time they reached the Cave, it was a splendid plan, and all that was required was a tiny bit of yessing on the part of the right grownups. Of course, grownups were finicky, so Eliza and Pansy would have to get them when they were in The Right Mood, or the grownups might be noing instead of yessing and with only a day to spare, the girls couldn’t chance a Bad Mood No that would, later in the week, under more reasonable circumstances and with enough judiciously-placed pestering, be converted into a Rethought Yes.

Confessions of a Cosleeping Junkie

This essay is one in a humorous series on parenting.

For many expectant parents, one of the perks of preparing for the new family member is setting up a nursery: a cheery room filled with a crib, a changing table, a dresser, fluffy wall decorations, adorable hanging mobiles, and lots of cuddlies. This is great, and great fun. But don't let this anticipatory decorating overly influence your choice for where to sleep baby. You might find there are other options you like better. (And you can still decorate a nursery even if no one will be using it. Just think of it as the modern answer to the formal living room.)

Anyone growing up in the West knows all about babies in their own rooms, so I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'm going to single-mindedly discuss bedsharing. It might appeal to you; it might repel you; but you owe it to yourself and your baby to look into it, if only to say "thought about it long and hard, not for us, now go away" to an overzealous Family Bedder. There's nothing fun, after all, in being caught totally unaware by someone offering an alternative. You'll certainly lose any debate with them, and more importantly, you might belatedly find out about something you wish you'd known about in the first place.

We're All in This Together

In many countries, and in many homes in this country, baby and parents sleep together in one bed (often along with older siblings, if there are any). It's a novel idea, considering what we normally have in mind when we think "baby sleeping," but it has many merits. This bedsharing is what we do with our youngest two (the 8-year-old has her own room and bed, though she occasionally pops in for a night or two with us). Let me describe.

We have this delectably humongous bed, which is really a queen flanked by two twins. It takes up almost an entire wall under the windows in our bedroom; this provides rolling-off-the-bed protection on two sides (and the twins are reversed, so the headboards are at the foot of the bed). We've put bed rails and various furniture--a soft-sided travel yard, a folded futon mattress buttressed by a side table--around the remaining open spaces. (This only prevents inadvertent rolling off; the toddler can still scale the edges if he's awake. Many bedsharing families put their mattresses right on the floor to obviate the whole question of how to prevent falling off the bed.) There's an opening at the foot of the bed without rails, right at Mommy's feet (so she can get up to pee the customary 1,000 times per night without overly disturbing the rest of the bunch); it's also where the toddler lets himself down when he wakes up from his nap. (This is a very nice, if unexpected, bonus: I never have to go get a toddler who, while pleasant upon waking, grew unhappy at being left in bed too long.)

Around the bed are a zillion pillows of various sizes; some are for sleeping on (for the grownups), and most are for padding the walls / rails / furniture. We've got two comforters and two big blankets, plus a baby-sized one for the baby. (The toddler moves around so much that covering him up with a blanket is pointless.) This is how it's been since the toddler was a baby; despite some alarmist-sounding rhetoric we read about smothering and becoming wedged under pillows and blankets, we never had a problem with this.

First off, a tiny baby, who might actually smother because she's too new to be able to move herself away (or roll over or push off the smothering offender or even yell insistently enough to get your attention), doesn't move around the bed. So put her in the middle far from pillows and blankets and she's fine. Second, when she gets big enough to scooch herself over to the pillows (and this is usually before she can roll or crawl), she's gotten good at hollering, and you are, of course, near enough to hear her (and you're checking on her every so often anyway). But yes, I guess there is a danger if you are the kind of parent who wants to have a baby but doesn't want to be bothered with actually staying in the vicinity while it's sleeping, or dismisses the baby's early cries as unimportant. As far as I can tell, these are the people the warnings about cosleeping are for, because for the rest of us, pillows and blankets or no, there's about a zero percent chance the baby will suffocate and you won't be there to stop it.

This brings us to the delicate topic of SIDS, which is an unpredictable and unpreventable tragedy for whom no one can be blamed. There is absolutely no evidence that sleeping with your baby heightens the risk of SIDS; on the contrary, many people feel it lessens the chance. I read one mother's story about this recently: her tiny baby made the smallest of sounds, which woke the mother, who found her baby gasping for breath and turning blue (but not making any more noise!). This mother felt certain that had her daughter been sleeping in another room, she would have died. Instead, the mother and father did everything they could think of to help their baby breathe again; and after a few moments, she did.

On the other hand, cosleeping is not a cure for SIDS; another mother relates the death of her infant while nursing. This tragic incident just goes to show that SIDS really has nothing to do with your skills or attentiveness as a parent. Certainly, being there when your child struggles for air gives you a chance to help her, but lots of babies diagnosed with SIDS died peacefully with no sign there was any trouble.

Now that we are feeling very somber, let me say that the point of these two paragraphs is this: while SIDS can happen to anyone, anywhere, it's not more likely to happen to your baby if she sleeps with you, and it might be less likely. At any rate, if you're like me, you'll sleep better with your little one close by, where you know you'll hear him if he cries or mews or even rolls over. (On the other hand, you'll sleep worse, because every little sound he makes will wake you up. It seemed like a fair trade to me: less anxiety, more interruptions.) I honestly can't imagine having my babies down the hall in another room, even with a monitor on. That's not all out of anxiety; there are also some very sweet treats when they're in your bed, such as:

• when they wake up at 2 am, look sleepily around, pad over to where you are, and flop down on your belly.
• when they wake your husband up in the morning and say "dada hi!"
• when you wake up in the morning, not quite ready to leave the cozy bed, and spend fifteen minutes playing "where's the baby?" with the blankets, or looking at a favorite book.
• when the eight-year-old and the baby practice rolls on the bed, giggling with delight.

These moments might be even more precious to the one (or both) of you who is working outside the home and has limited time with your baby during the day.

There are also practical benefits. Babies wake up a lot at night; when they're little this is usually to eat, and when they're older it can be for reassurance or from gas pains or from who knows what? In any case, you're right there; you don't have to get out of bed and walk to the nursery, lug them out of the crib, and sit with your ankles freezing (if it's winter) while you try to feed them / calm them / get them back to sleep.

Breastfeeding in Bed

There is a myth that a cosleeping, breastfeeding mother will not even need to wake up to feed her baby. Of course, she will have to wake up, at least enough to roll over to the baby and help her latch on, then stay there while she nurses. And sleeping while someone is sucking on your breast is not really that easy; it's like sleeping while someone is scratching your back: it's a distraction. What the bedsharing mother does gain, however, is the luxurious comfort of not leaving her bed to get the baby (a big plus on cold nights) and not having to pinch herself to stay awake until she gets baby safely tucked into his own bed again. The bedsharing mother may not sleep through nursing, but she'll still be in a sleepy state when it's over; the mother whose baby sleeps in his own bed will more than likely be wide awake.

Trust me on this. With baby #1, my first husband and I had a plan all worked out: she would sleep in a bassinet at the foot of our bed until she was big enough to graduate to her crib down the hall. This lasted one night. I was exhausted, my husband was exhausted, the baby was exhausted (and very peeved), and my parents were timidly asking as they brought the baby to their delirious daughter in bed, "We have to leave now . . . where should we put her?" I answered, "Here. Right here. Beside me. That way I don't have to get up." It was desperate, selfish reasoning, but it was also the best radical change of plan I could have made.

Even so, I was brand new at mothering and breastfeeding, and I still got up to sit in the rocker and nurse #1 at night. Until one day I discovered that you could lie down and breastfeed at the same time. Holy mackerel! We took to the bed and nursed until we got the hang of it, which was about three seconds. From then on, night stopped being synonymous with the Eternal Down Under.

Naturally, with babies two and three we went straight for the bedsharing, bednursing plan.

Comforting an Unhappy Baby

Another benefit of having your baby sleep with you is that when he wakes and needs reassurance or has pains, you're right there. You don't have to assess his cries from afar, debating whether they're worth getting up for. (If they are, he will be howling and wide awake by the time you're finished assessing.) You can sleepily rub his back, murmur "there there" to him, kiss his cheek, hold him close to you, or just let him know you're with him if he's thrashing about too much for any of that. Of course, you would be with him if he were screaming in his own bed, too, but you wouldn't be lying warm and cozy under a delicious layer of covers.

We experienced the difference between #1 and #2, when we stopped night nursing with each one. #1 moved from our bed to her crib around six months of age. At seven months, having previously slept through the night, she was again waking to nurse, and we figured she was old enough not to need the milk anymore; we decided it was probably just habit waking. (This appears to be common among breastfed babies according to my soldiers in the field; after a few weeks of sleeping through the night right on schedule, they resume nighttime waking to nurse again and they'll do it as long as you oblige them.) Armed with a kitchen timer, we resolved not to go to her on the theory she would eventually give it up as a lost cause and go back to sleep. It worked--after several grueling minutes where we looked at each other and wondered what horrible damage we were doing to our poor little baby. (Not much, as far as I can tell now, but boy did we suffer.)

With #2, however, it was much easier. First of all, still being together in the same bed, I gladly obliged his night nursing through 11 months of age, when, newly pregnant with #3, I was too exhausted to keep it up. He woke, we didn't nurse, he howled and thrashed about for a while; but we were there with him, soothing and reassuring him, and he never had to feel we had abandoned him (okay, we never had to feel we had abandoned him). Though the howling lasted longer than it had with #1, the trauma to the parents (and, we assume, to the baby) was much less severe.

Now a toddler, #2 still occasionally wakes in the night; left to his own devices, he can work himself into a fairly good panic. When we're beside him, however, he crawls over to one of us and puts one pudgy little arm around our neck, his face against our shoulder, and falls back into a quiet sleep. (If he's having gas pains, which you can tell by the farting going on, this takes longer.)

You may be thinking, "But this does not foster independence." The heck it doesn't! My theory is that an independent older child (and adult) is one whose needs, physical and emotional, were met as a young child. The emotional needs of the baby and toddler pretty much revolve around love and security from her caregivers. And anyway, why on earth should a little person who can barely speak need to be independent?

But What About Sex?

You will not need to worry about this for at least the first six weeks (trust me, however lusty your relationship with your partner, no woman has the energy for sex in the first six weeks; either you gave birth vaginally and the thought of anything touching you in that general area is horrifying, or you gave birth via C-section and you're far too sore in your lower abdomen to imagine anyone coming near it. Either way, you'll be bleeding for several weeks afterward, and that is generally a big turn-off for everyone involved. But hey, Your Mileage May Vary.)

But okay; at some point you and your partner will need each other in a big way. If there's a baby in your bed, how do you manage it?

If you've read anything about bedsharing, you've probably heard the usual answer to this question: be inventive. Do it in the guest bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garage, the car. This is pretty good advice for any relationship (variety is the spice of life and all that), but it's not the only answer. It might be the culturally correct answer, but it's not the only one.

Your other alternative is to have sex in the bed while the baby is there. Yes, this is a statement with very high shock value in America, but that's not why it's here. It's here because it's a simple, obvious solution to what doesn't have to be a problem in the first place. (Consider that more people in the world live in countries where entire families share a single bedroom and this is a total non-issue than live in America, where we are a bit uptight about sex.) But how can I say this? Am I advocating child abuse or what? Let me elaborate.

First of all, a tiny baby will sleep through everything: the vacuum cleaner, the dog barking, an argument, the radio, the telephone, and the screaming 8-year-old. (On a side note, you would be well advised to provide as much of this noise for your infant as possible; she'll sleep through it as a newborn, and once she's used to it, she'll be able to sleep through much of it when she's older, too.) She will certainly sleep through the comparatively boring sounds of you and your partner making love.

As your baby grows older and more alert, simpler sounds will wake him more readily, but your ooohs and aaahs (unless you are very vocal during sex) will not pass the waking threshhold. Our toddler has never once woken as a result of our lovemaking; he has woken for the usual reasons (gas pains, hunger), at which point we've temporarily stopped having sex, comforted or nursed him, and gone back to it once he slept again.

While we've got sex and nursing in the same sentence, let me make a brief digression. Nursing is indeed a pleasurable physical experience, but it's not an arousing one; the pleasure has the form of scratching an itch or getting a massage, but not of sexual stimulation. This is obviously a mental thing, because the same actions on the part of my husband are very erotic to me. Even the midstream switch from sex to nursing hasn't ever proven problematic; my brain immediately flips from regarding my breasts as "love objects" to regarding them as "feeding objects." So don't worry; you're not going to have some secret guilty sex life with your baby against your will if you're breastfeeding. If arousal from breastfeeding distresses you (as it does me), your brain simply isn't going to take you there.

Okay, back to sex around the baby. We've only had experience up to age eighteen months or so, but I've heard from others that they've made love with older children in the room too. According to them, the older child has never woken either. I'd imagine the same game plan could work for an older child as a younger one: put sex on pause and attend to the child. Sure, you'll probably have an occasional night when you get frustrated by a child having trouble getting back to sleep, but you can handle that, right? Besides, you can always take a shower together or move to another room to finish The Deed.

The only other sticky point with an older child is the possible question, "What are you doing?" Friends have suggested you answer this honestly and simply: "Mommy and Daddy are spending special time together." It's true without being overwhelming, and it reassures a child who wonders why this heretofore unseen thing is going on. ("Nothing, nothing, just go back to sleep" is decidedly nonreassuring.) Your child doesn't want the whole Birds and Bees discussion or even the name for what you're doing; she just wants to know that it's a normal thing and it doesn't have anything to do with monsters or the Bogey Man.

Naturally, only you and your partner know if you feel comfortable making love with your sleeping children nearby. We find it easy around babies and toddlers, but unthinkable around the 8-year-old; I suspect we'll cross our privacy threshhold when #2 is old enough to notice what we're doing and inquire about it. But only if he's awake.

But What About Child Abuse?

Child abuse is a terrible thing, and people who perpetrate it should have their genitals removed without anesthesia and be sentenced to hard labor for life. But that's not really pertinent to a discussion of bedsharing, any more than it's pertinent to a discussion of families sharing a hotel room on vacation. I mean, do you feel more attracted to a child just because you sleep near him? Of course not. Someone who finds children sexually arousing finds them arousing on the playground, at school, in daycare, at the doctor's, and everywhere else. There's nothing special about the bed. And if you're not aroused by children, nothing about being in bed with them will cause you to feel more so. Imagine sleeping with your grandmother, or your sister, or your dog. Do you suddenly want to jump their bones? Of course not.

So don't get worked up about child abuse. It's a non-issue in bedsharing.

The Baby's Point of View

So far, everything I've said about bedsharing is from the parents' point of view (and as you can see, I speak for the creatures of comfort among us). But what does the baby think?

Of course, we don't really know what the baby thinks. But here's what I think the baby thinks.

Imagine you have spent nine months in your mother's belly, warm and muffled, snug and dark. Suddenly you are propelled outward into an airy, cold, open place. Naturally, you scream in alarm. Then you're folded into your mother's arms and placed at her breast, and you feel much better. It's warmer, it's snugglier, it sounds and smells like home, and it tastes good.

Many hours later, after being held by your parents (and other lucky relatives), you are put down in a place where none of them are. This is not so fun anymore. You're a tiny new person and you know instinctively that your survival depends on your parents' love and attachment. So things don't look very promising right now. Apparently they're not attached yet. You're pretty overwhelmed at this point, though, having just been born, so you fall asleep anyway.

As you get older, it seems that your parents are becoming quite attached to you; they carry you around in their arms, in front packs, in slings. They sing to you, babble at you, gaze at you, and feed you. You are contented and delighted and in love. These are all promising signs that you will survive! So what gives with this isolation every night?

Of course, the worst part is that you don't realize it's temporary isolation. For such a new person, every moment is its own; when you're alone, who can say it won't always be that way? You'll be a lot older before you can make this intellectual step.

Being new, you can't speak or walk or even point and mime what you want, so you do what you can do: you cry. Usually this brings one of your parents into the room, at which point you're reassured that your parents still exist and that they're still attached. Sometimes nobody comes immediately, though, and then you have to step up the crying until they do. Sometimes nobody comes for a really long time, and then you really have to give it your all. At these times, it does not look rosy on the survival front.

You don't realize that your parents are concerned that you are Manipulating them, or perhaps that you are Too Dependent. All you know is that your fate depends on them and that you're in love with them, and naturally you prefer being with them to being without them. Eventually, when you're older, you'll understand that things (like your parents) don't cease to exist when you no longer see them, and a few years later you'll even want to be away from your parents, proud of your independence, a little do-it-yourselfer. But you're not there yet, and when you're alone it's pretty miserable.

All of this applies to your baby's entire day, of course, not just the nights. Sitting in a stroller, lying in a bassinet in the living room, and riding in the car seat are probably equally trying moments for your newborn. So you might consider keeping him with you as much as possible. You can't get out of the car seat thing, of course, but you can minimize the number of places he has to go in the car; and a front pack or sling is a wonderful thing for keeping a sleeping baby near Mom or Dad. Enjoy holding them close while they're little; soon enough they'll be too heavy, too wriggly, and too independent for it!

A Few Parting Words

As you can see, I love having my babies in our bed during the night, and I've tried to show just why in the paragraphs above. Your situation, being yours and not mine, will be different, and you might find another solution works better for your family. There are many shades of cosleeping, ranging from everybody in the same bed to a bedside cosleeper to a crib in the same room; from the first few months of your baby's life through the first ten years. Go with your family's natural flow, and take it one day at a time; whether you initially cosleep or put baby in a separate room, you can always change your mind later.

Bill Gates Ain't Got Nothin' On Me

This essay is a thoughtful exception in a mostly humorous series on parenting.

As a child I was applauded for my above-average intelligence. I excelled in all things academic; my social life was extraordinarily poor and I was picked on a lot, but I knew I was worthwhile because I was smart. I earned a degree in mathematics and planned to pursue my doctorate. I had visions of the great and dazzling things I’d do with my brain, the inspiring professor I would be, the discoveries I would make that would improve the world and further mankind’s quest to understand the universe.

Somewhere in there I had my first baby, and I discovered my bliss.

It didn’t have anything to do with my intelligence at all.

I spent the next ten years in a struggle to exorcise my belief that I had to “make good” on my intellectual potential. I was fulfilled by being a mother; by being a social being, part of a family, part of a community, by hands-on activities like baking bread and building a tower of Duplos on the living room floor. I felt a peace in those activities that I did not feel in my intellectual pursuits. Yet I had internalized the cultural message that it’s better to get an education and work at something abstract than to get no education and work with one’s hands. Building chips to power mobile phones is a more worthwhile pursuit than growing wheat; teaching students how to prove a triangle is equilateral is more worthwhile than making a home. I felt I was throwing my life away on something small, run-of-the-mill, unexceptional. I was capable of so much more. Anyone can be a mother, right?

The thrill of solving a mathematical problem was highly satisfying to me. The jolt of energy from pondering philosophical problems into the night with fellow students was electric. Seeing one of my students' eyes light up with understanding, writing a computer program in tightly-packed, super-efficient assembly code and then watching it perform, hashing out chip design issues with the architects and fellow programmers at work: all these things were very rewarding. My intellectual pursuits made me passionate; I felt alive, charged, pumped, intoxicated. It’s a pretty nice way to feel.

But over the years I’ve learned not to idolize that feeling. For one thing, it’s temporary. No one lives in a state of eternal passion. If that’s what you’re aiming for, you’re going to be disappointed a lot of the time. Second, powerful and wonderful as it is, that passionate feeling is not fulfilling. It is a place of tension and imbalance. It made me want to change the world right now, and left me frustrated and impatient with the mundane aspects of my life. And those mundane aspects account for a good 80%. I spent a lot of time being stressed, or bored, or both.

Last, I have come to realize that the quiet fulfillment I get when I am just doing what I’m doing, you know, just doing those mundane things, brings me peace and serenity. In those moments there is no tension, no imbalance. Life is pure and good on its own terms. I am the person I want to be, not frazzled and impatient, but kind and loving. I feel complete and very, very lucky.

I’ve also come to question the inherent value of higher education and of the “work” we humans do. When I was a programmer, I often felt that my work was useless. It was fun, yes, but it didn’t better the world. Who needs another super-fast DSP chip to run mobile phones at a lower wattage or to power increasingly realistic violence in game graphics?

The human intellect has come to be idolized over the past several centuries, and I don’t think that's a good thing. Sure, many of our inventions are truly useful—the wheel, better methods of harvesting grain, wind-powered mills, saws. Some of these inventions have made the difference between life and death during a harsh winter. (The faster you can harvest grain, the more you can harvest, and the longer you can live through a blizzard-infested winter. Yes, I’ve been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books lately.) Often, however, that extra capacity has translated into more work. If you can wash clothes in a machine in two hours, then you can wash them more often. The definition of soiled migrates from “truly grungy” to “been worn once"--or even to “been out of the closet.”

Human invention has divorced human endeavor from the process of making a living. Our remarkable creativity has allowed us to conceive all manner of gadgets and idgits. Bit by bit we have separated ourselves from the need to provide directly for our own survival. Technology has allowed us to produce surplus; in turn, this allows us to specialize. I am the wheat farmer, you breed cattle, he is the greengrocer, she is the tailor. We trade our surplus for what another can provide. As the wheel of progress rolls on, we find that we must specialize. What begins as a luxury becomes necessity when we no longer possess the knowledge to provide for all our needs. We must each find a trade for which others will pay us so that we can purchase our survival.

Paired with our inventiveness is a drive toward efficiency. I can cut down Truffula trees four times as fast with my Super-Axe-Hacker; that is good, that is progress. But this focus on progress is misleading. Progress without purpose is not a priori good.

A Super-Axe-Hacker is good if, at my current rate of Truffula-whacking, I will not harvest enough Truffulas to survive. It is superfluous if I don’t need the extra Truffulas. Sure, now I can harvest four times as many, so I can plant four times as many. But that does me no good if I don’t need more Truffulas. What will I do with them?

It is our innate pleasure in creativity which leads to this kind of superfluous efficiency. We create because we can; not every invention has a ready audience. Even for those that do, we feel compelled to broaden that audience in the name of progress. This often leads to spurious “needs.”

It is a fine thing to have a surplus to share with the less fortunate or to trade for other goods. If I have some extra Truffula trees, I can trade the unused tufts with my neighbor who has an extra cow; I need one, since Bessie died over the summer. I gladly leave some tufts on the doorstep of the family down the road whose Truffula crop unexpectedly failed. I know they are expecting another baby, and the husband is on the mend from a broken hip.

But suppose Super-Axe-Hackers are “in.” I’ve been hearing about them in town. Together with the neighbors, I buy one. Together we harvest an immense number of Truffulas. We keep what we need; we give or trade what we will; and then we look further afield. Our needs are met this year; we’ll be wanting money for the remaining Truffulas, money we can keep until it’s needed. We need to find a market for our surplus Truffulas. If one does not exist, we will create it.

If I wish to sell my Truffulas, I must convince others they are of value. Never mind that folks one town over have done just fine without Truffulas; I will show them how soft, how silky, how desirable a Truffula tuft really is, much better than that old has-been cotton.

If I want a greater audience for my breastmilk replacement, I must convince mothers they need it. I use many arguments; each will appeal to a different mother. Does she wish to be in fashion? I will suggest that every modern woman uses it; only the hopelessly passé still breastfeed. Does she fear for her baby’s health? I will point out the nutritional qualities of my replacement. Does she hate the inconvenience, always being on call? I will point out that fathers can give the bottle at 3 AM.

My breastmilk replacement was of incalculable value for the original purpose for which I created it: for infants who could not breastfeed, for whatever reason, and would otherwise have died. It is a worthy invention. My desire to bring it to a wider audience is, however, quite base. In the name of progress, in my delight at my inventiveness, I do not make the world a better place; I make it less so. My replacement is far better than nothing, far better than cow’s milk or any other substitute, but it is far inferior to breastmilk. And yet I push it on mothers who do not need it.

So we invent to solve real problems, then run amok with the solutions. We apply them where no solution is required. We lose sight of what is essential and fall prey to what is possible.

Once survival is divorced from our own direct efforts, once it can be purchased, all manner of unlikely trades become available. We place increasing value on those that can provide us with more time, more luxury, more entertainment, more progress. We have bestowed an inordinate amount of value on pursuits of the mind. Yet these pursuits are precisely those far removed from survival. My mathematical proofs will not feed the farmer, yet you value my work over his. You praise my intelligence while disparaging his.

Must one be dimwitted to choose a practical trade? We assume so. Why would anyone raise chickens if he had the wits to program computers? Perhaps because he values the connection with the essential, because he feels drawn by a sense of fulfillment in ordinary things, the things of survival.

If I value intellect over practical skill, specialization over breadth, I will place a higher value on trades that require greater intellect and education and will devalue those that do not. An average programmer earns five times what an average daycare worker earns. Both of them and the guy flipping burgers at the McDonald’s earn infinitely more than a stay-at-home mother. Who plays the more crucial role? Whose work determines whether our future leaders will be wise and compassionate or self-serving and vicious? Who profoundly influences, indeed instills, the values of the next generation?

The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.

Strategic Cleaning

This essay is part of a humorous series on parenting.

My obsession started when I was a young girl playing teacher.

I lined up all my subjects according to height, number of spots or stripes, and length of fur. I made up an alphabetized roll call, renaming some of my students in order to have at least one name for every letter of the alphabet. I spent hours fashioning a gradebook like the one I’d seen Ms. McCallum use at school, one with a column for every pop quiz and test, averages over the six-week period, and yearly results.

I never did any conversing with my would-be students, or explaining of arithmetic or grammar. All I did was organize.

You can imagine how completely, utterly, catastrophically upended my orderly little world was when I started having housemates in college.

Now picture me with children.

I will not traumatize you with the gory details of the years since my organizational bliss was double-whammied. Let me just share with you what I have learned since then. My little tips for saving your sanity in the midst of motherhood.

Remember, organization can be a sign of mental disease. That’s right! Show your mental health and throw off the shackles of obsessive, compulsive cleanliness and order!

Transfer spring cleaning to the winter. This is when your children will get the stomach flu and throw up all over their beds, then your bed, the carpet, and the bathroom walls. This is when you will wash every comforter and pillow in the house, steam-clean the carpet, and sanitize the bathroom. Don’t set yourself up for apoplectic stress fits by doing any of this kind of cleaning at any other time of the year, only to have it undone by the first tiny microbe that flies by. Wait for winter’s germy charms and you’ll be glad to be doing it.

Build your own furniture out of Legos. Guests won't be able to tell what's a mess and what's modern design.

Been There, Done That: Essays on Motherhood

A (mostly) humorous series of essays on being a parent dating from 2002 and 2003.

The essays below reflect my personal views; their purpose is to entertain. If you don't feel entertained, just surf on off to somewhere more interesting; please don't write to tell me I'm wrong or that you disagree. It's just my opinion, to which I am entitled.

Strategic Cleaning
You Do Know What Causes That, Don't You?
Bill Gates Ain't Got Nothin' On Me

Five Tips on Choosing a Translator

You won’t generally be able to check the quality of a translation—if you could, you wouldn’t need a translator. Here are five tips on what to look for.

The Target Language Is the Translator’s Native Language

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, put it this way: “No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.”

The Translator Is Very, Very Good in His Native Language

Just because a person speaks a language “like a native” doesn’t mean he speaks it well. After all, many native English speakers say things like The dog just laid there sleeping and He done gone and broke it again. A good translator has a love for languages and an impeccable command of his native tongue. He’ll also have references to help him when he’s uncertain—Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style are two indispensable works. Last but not least, he’ll know when to violate a rule for the sake of clarity and readability.

The Translator Spends Enough Time on Your Translation

Chances are you’re going to use the completed translation “as is” without any further editing. The translator must therefore not only translate your text, but also proofread it—preferably more than once. No matter how wonderful he is, there will be quirky phrasings in a document after he’s translated it. This is a result of the translation process; the translator hovers like Schroedinger's cat between the two languages while he’s translating.

The only way to catch these blunders is to let the translated text lie untouched for a day or so, then return to it and read it anew. This time the translator is reading his native language without any interference from the source language. Things that just don’t sound right will stick out like a sore thumb. This second reading is also the time when the translator will catch typing mistakes, inconsistencies in capitalization, and other minor errors.

Don't Expect Miracles

A translator’s task is to turn text in one language into correct text in another language so that the meaning and style are preserved. If there are non-linguistic errors in the original text, your translator usually won’t be able to catch them. This is why it’s an advantage when a translator has some background in the subject of your document.

A translation never matches the original word for word, but a good translator won’t significantly alter the original text. His task is to communicate your message as you intended it. As a result, if your text is poorly organized in the source language, it will be poorly organized in the target language. Substantial style changes are the work of an editor, not a translator. Many good translators make excellent editors, by the way.

If you would like the translator to edit your document for structure and style, ask him up front. That way he can begin editing while translating, which will decrease the editing period (and your cost) after the translation.

Price Isn’t Everything

As the 19th-century English philosopher and social critic John Ruskin famously said, “There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell at a lower price, and he who considers price only is that man’s lawful prey.”

It’s usually a bad sign when a translator’s rates are bargain basement. But a higher price doesn’t necessarily guarantee higher quality: a beginning translator often charges lower rates, for example, but that doesn’t prevent him from translating like the best of them. And any translator can set high prices without ever having to prove his skill.

If you’ll often need translations, you can approach multiple translators with a sample text. Five hundred words are enough. Have a professional editor or writer critique the translations for you. This does cost more up front, but it will give you much greater confidence in the quality of your future translations.