The Ghostly Chronicles : Chapter 1 Who Is It?

Now that I had this little red-headed baby at home to take care of, I was a little scared.  I had babysat for lots of kids when I was a teenager but never for a brand new tiny baby.  And dolls never were of interest to me except for use as self-defense against my brother.  There had not been any type of childbirth classes or newborn care classes at the Naval Hospital, so I was pretty dumb about tiny babies.  I knew you had to feed them and change them and keep them clean, the basics, but not much else.  He was so little that he looked like he would break, so that is how I treated him.

My mom was there; we had moved into a house since Mike and my brother, who had recently come home from Vietnam, were both stationed at locations where they didn't get to come home every night.  She helped me out, but of course, everything was the old school kind of care.  She told me that Pampers, a very new invention, was bad for a newborn's skin.  So I used cloth diapers.  What a nightmare that was.  Women and girls of the modern age, you are so lucky that technology has pretty much-eliminated cloth diapers and the use them.  I had a diaper service, but you still had to rinse the diapers and store them in a container until the diaper guy came to pick them up.  What a horrible job he had, riding in a truck of poopie smelling diapers all day.

Another prehistoric thing I did was make my own formula from Pet Milk, not pet, like a dog or cat, a brand of canned milk that you mixed with water and Karo syrup.  It was very easily digested and used for who knows how many years, a long time for sure. The powdered formula made by big companies seemed to irritate the regurgitation button on all of my kids.  Every day, you had to make two batches of the formula and put it in sterilized baby bottles, and then sterilize the bottles again with the formula in them.  It was a never-ending task. I was worn out every day.  Fortunately, Glen was a pretty good baby who did sleep pretty close to four hours in-between feedings, but I just wasn't getting enough sound sleep.  Same story for all new moms.

The house we lived in Temple Hills. Maryland, near Andrews Air Force Base.  It was a two-story home, pretty large, 2 baths and 3 bedrooms, kitchen, living and dining room upstairs, downstairs there was a laundry room, a family room, a private master bedroom suite with a sitting room and two separate storage areas.  My brother lived downstairs when he was home, Mike and I had the master bedroom upstairs, and my mom and Baby Glen had separate bedrooms.  Glen actually slept in my room in a bassinet simply because it was more convenient.

At night, when I would have to go warm a bottle for Glen in the middle of the night, I would be very uncomfortable.  We had a carport with a door leading into the kitchen.  While I would be heating the bottle in the bottle warmer, which seemed to take forever, I would be so uncomfortable waiting on it, I felt like somebody was staring at me.  The feeling was so strong that I was afraid to turn around and look at the door with the window in it.  I was terrified.  I would grab that bottle and almost run back to my room.  I thought it was my imagination, alone at the far end of the house in the dark in the middle of the night, I just told myself that I was stupid.  This went on for weeks, and instead of becoming accustomed to the darkness and the silence, I was becoming more and more afraid.  I was convinced that a peeping Tom in the neighborhood eyeballed me in my babydoll nightie every night.  Finally, I told my mom, and she would get up with me every night. She actually called the cops because she was sure that there was someone in the carport watching us.  The cops came and walked around the yard and house and found nothing.

I finally told Mike about my fear of the kitchen in the middle of the night when I was alone.  Of course, he thought it was kind of funny.  According to him, there was nothing to be afraid of this was a quiet, nice neighborhood; nothing was going on here.  I asked him if he would get up with me at night when he was home, and he said he would.  Saying he isn't doing it, he always slept like he was dead.  I would roll him over, push on him, pull on him, get right in his ear and call his name; he never moved—my hero.  I was hoping that any day now that Glen would sleep through the night, and I wouldn't have to go out there anymore when it was dark.  I couldn't keep waking my mom up, she had to get up early to get ready for work, and her lack of sleep was playing havoc on her ability to get up on time in the morning.  I was just going to have to keep doing it by myself.

Did I mention the deeply wooded area directly behind the house?