75 Godiva St | Afternoon

[defenderofdesmoines]

You know that stage of moving where your major furniture is all set up, and you can technically live in your home, and you're considering maybe just that your life is cardboard boxes forever, and maybe they're actually sort of cute? Cardboardcore. Start a new trend.

Anyway.

"What should we actually do with all of these boxes when we're done?" Annie wondered, opening up yet another box of books. For such card-carrying members of Team Himbo, they had, like, way too many of these. Kindles for everyone before the next move. "Make a fort in the backyard?"

Aww. They had a backyard now.

[for the husband!]

Comments

[knife_bender]

"We can save them in the basement and do the fort thing when the kids are older." Newborns didn't seem like they'd be able to enjoy it.

[defenderofdesmoines]

But what about the two adults who could totally enjoy a fort now, Diego? Annie probably had a whole month to go before she'd nix that idea on the basis of not wanting to try to navigate a cardboard fort while in her second trimester.

"We'll have to put them up good and high, in case the basement floods," Annie noted thoughtfully, idly playing with the flaps of one box. It would be a real shame to save all this cardboard for future kid projects and instead just end up with a mildew factory.

[knife_bender]

"Shhh, don't jinx our new house." They had to pay for these types of things now! "No basement is flooding."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"We live on an island, babe," Annie pointed out, straightening up and placing a hand on her lower back to try to ease an ache there. At ten weeks, her bump was not only increasingly visible, but also now beginning to be an actual strain on her body. "But fair."

And cue her walking over to a beautiful, wood doorframe and giving it a little tap, to undo her jinx. All better!

[knife_bender]

"And the island has yet to have had a flood since I've been here. It barely snowed last winter." Don't go blaming Maryland's problems on the island, Diego.

"Guess we have to make the house look like an actual house, huh? With shit on the walls and everything." He would veto any mounted animals and oil portraits of family members. He had enough of that.

[defenderofdesmoines]

Well, damn, that was so Annie's aesthetic!

(She would similarly nix any golden chandeliers or blown-up magazine portraits of herself.)

"Eventually," Annie agreed, crossing over to take a break from unpacking in the name of giving her husband a kiss. Equally important, okay? "We can hang up some of those wedding pictures."

[knife_bender]

"We have been sitting on those, haven't we?" Diego asked, kissing her back. One of his hands went to rest against her cute little baby bump that was quickly becoming not-so-little. "Paid all that money for a photographer we should have those pictures everywhere."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"At least a few of them," Annie agreed, sliding her arms around his neck with a fond smile. "But we can put other cool stuff on the walls. Maybe like...art."

If Annie sounded skeptical, it was because Annie was totally a person who'd hang up a loopy-cursive sign she bought at Home Goods that said gather and would call it art.

[knife_bender]

"Do you have any art preferences?" Diego asked, lifting his eyebrows. "Because I sure as shit don't."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I think we'll know what we like when we see it," Annie told him, confirming that there would totally be a future trip to Target or something involving her dropping pictures of succulents and cute analog clocks into their cart. "And we also get to decorate the kids' room, too."

Gotta cherish these early years before the twins had their own tastes and preferences.

[knife_bender]

"That's going to be fun," Diego said with a grin. "We gotta think of a cool theme."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Animals seem to be big with babies, theme-wise," Annie pointed out sagely. "Lot of, like, cute jungle animals and Noah's Ark-themed nurseries in my research so far."

'Research' meaning, like, Instagram and BabyTok.

"Though maybe we give Noah a miss," she added, making a little face. "That's actually a pretty dark story for kids, now that I'm thinking about it."

Like, sure, animals marching two by two onto a boat, cute, but what about all the drowned, sinful humans who were left behind? Lessons like that one were why Annie had grown into a fearful, if faithful, little kid, and why she was determined to keep all things Old (and, for that matter, New!) Testament away from her children's formative minds as long as possible.

[knife_bender]

"Animals aren't cool though," Diego said. "I was thinking, like, a space battle or ninjas or something."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Space battle is kind of violent," Annie pointed out doubtfully. "But ninjas might be cool. They're going to be in little footie pajamas all the time anyway."

And maybe it would encourage the twins to grow up super quiet and stealthy, like their dad!

[knife_bender]

"I just want to limit the pastels going on," Diego said. "We're going to get enough of it from your mother."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"She's just excited," Annie said, with a lingering note of doubt because he was not wrong at all, and Donna was also already showing a worryingly predictable trend of leaning hard into baby-girl pink and baby-boy blue. "I think color's going to be a thing no matter what, honey. They don't really make a lot of baby stuff in black and gray."

Maybe in, like, somewhere serious and a little depressing, like...Norway, or something.

[knife_bender]

Diego sighed. "That's a shame."

He had worn a lot of black as a child, but he figured his father had probably custom ordered it or whatever so they all could match.

"I guess I'm just going to have to accept the first couple years are going to be filled with cutesy stuff."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Even if we find something in like, navy blue," Annie told him, like she was sorry to break this news to him, "it's still gonna have, like, a duckling embroidered on it."

Again: cute animals and babies seemed like a very natural pairing.

"But the cutesy stuff is like...actually cute when it's our babies, I think," Annie added, already smiling at the idea of their kids wearing duckling onesies or whatever.

[knife_bender]

"I think I might need to see it in action," he said lightly. "But I'll probably have a bias to my own kids, you're right."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I think most parents do," Annie replied, leaning up for another kiss before taking a step back to survey the room. "At least we have all summer to try to find some baby clothes that don't have clouds with smiley faces on them."

God, that sounded cute.

"And to make sure this is how we want to keep everything for awhile," she added, glancing around the room. She was pretty sure that, even setting aside her inevitable summer of heavy pregnancy, neither of them was going to be in the mood to try a new living room arrangement once they had two infants to wrangle.

[knife_bender]

"And we gotta baby-proof things and figure out how those baby-proof things open." Diego had already done some research on some of those locks and could already see himself getting frustrated and ripping it off.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Yeah, I don't get why it has to be so hard," Annie mused, anticipating some similar frustration. "But at least we have a lot of time to practice? I feel like I'm gonna need it."

Maybe that was just a normal part of pregnancy no one talked about. Sure, you heard all about the glamorous things like morning sickness and how their babies were the size of a couple of little strawberries now, but maybe everyone also secretly spent the middle months mastering the art of the babyproofed cabinet door.

[knife_bender]

"They're seriously designed like babies are master cat burglars," Diego complained. "...though I guess I was about 4 or 5 when I learned how to pick locks."

Aw, he couldn't wait to teach his kids that.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Aww, teeny little Diego," Annie sighed with a soft smile. "But yeah, exactly. They're our kids. They're gonna figure that kind of thing out."

Even if Annie had been an extremely well-behaved child, she had caused a block-wide blackout as a toddler by accident, and that's where she was thinking these kids might kind of take after their mom.

(If they even had powers, anyway. )

[knife_bender]

Powers or no, Diego and Annie had plenty of other questionable skills to teach their kids.

Diego looked around at the sea of cardboard boxes, also thinking maybe they should just leave them there forever. "Where do we even start?"