Chapter 60: Birthday Presents

Lydia

‘Learning on the job’ was something we were all very accustomed to. There was no manual for raising a child with three mothers and one dad and there was no manual for making a marathon runner into a cross country skier. But without tooting our own horns, we could credibly claim we were doing a great job of both, at least if no crooked company smuggled horse meat into our food.

Feli was happy as a clam. At six months some mothers would have started to wean her, but Regina insisted she would breast-feed her for twelve months. She had done the same with Jenny, and considering that Jenny had turned out more than well, none of us was going to argue. Jenny had – almost predictably – won both races at the season-opening event in Emden in a Ross-Rotax kart. Jonjo’s creation had proven an instant success on its first ever outing.

Of course Jenny couldn’t help herself and bragged to her long-distance boyfriend Matt in Pasadena that she now didn’t only have her own race engineer, but personal designer as well.

“Have you given her the birds and the bees?” I asked Regina. “If that boy really comes over to live here in three years, the two of them will end up in the sack within a week.”

“They’ll be fourteen,” she snorted. “But yeah, I had that talk with her.”

“Have you forgotten at what age we had our kids,” I reminded her. “And unlike we and our hopeless knights in dirty underwear back then, those two are hopelessly smitten with each other.”

“Do you know something I don’t?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” I said with a sigh. “I take it you’ve noticed a slight change on Jenny lately?”

“Well, her boobs start growing a year earlier than they did on me,” she said. “It will take a year or two until it will be really visible, but I noticed she started to avoid Mark.”

I wordlessly directed her to the porch and pointed at the pool. Mark, Nadja and Jenny were playing their favorite game of beach volleyball in the water. Since it was early February, the water heating shrouded them in condensation mist.”

Regina stared at me.

“Mark has sat her down and explained it was perfectly normal that she changes. From what I can tell he was a bit too successful. She went from being confused to being proud of what’s growing on her chest. She has made a photo of herself and has sent it to Matt. And she wasn’t wearing anything at the time.”

“Good grief,” Regina said, scandalized, and covered her mouth with her hands.

“For Christ sake, don’t let her know that we keep tabs on their emails, but I can tell you one thing, for two eleven year olds, they are damn serious. For all I know you can set a wedding date for when they’re old enough in seven years time.”

“Oh my god, seriously?” Regina reacted, slightly panicked.

“What did you expect?” I told her with a chuckle. “She comes after you. Now, calm down, it’s only emails and Mark made sure their emails are encrypted. He spent three nights tinkering with the Email server when he found out about the photo. And Matt’s dad is an IT professional, so Mark wrote him an email to tie down the fort at their end.”

“So it can’t leak?” she asked.

“It can’t, and knowing Mark he’ll find a way to talk to her about it without giving away he knows about the photo.”

“Jeez, I wanted to wring Meri’s neck when she dumped it all on him last year. But right now I’m happy she did.”

“Better get used to it,” I said with a giggle. “Jenny is a firecracker. I’m starting to understand what John has gone through, putting up with my antics over the years.”

Mark

Having a heated pool was the best luxury one could think of, but even the short walk back to the guest house reminded us in a hurry that it was winter. Jenny was properly shivering and couldn’t get back into her clothes quickly enough.

Nadja and I got dressed as well. She kissed both Jenny and me and left to look after our offspring.

“Can you sit down for a moment Jenny?”

She did so and looked expectantly at me.

“Mommy talked to you about boys and girls, didn’t she?”

“Which one?” she threw my signature tagline back at me with a giggle.

I gave her a stern look and she understood I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She nodded.

“And after we talked about how you start to become a grown-up girl over the next years, you were quite happy about it at the end.”

She nodded again.

“Now, when a boy or a girl starts to grow up and already has a sweetheart, you sometimes get silly ideas. When mommy Lydia and I met, we sent each other pictures of each other.”

That was technically a lie. None of us had any idea of what the internet would be back in 1992, although, once we had it in our home, we had actually done so, especially when Lydia was away in altitude camps.

I felt a bit bad about deceiving the little girl, after all I knew what she had done, but I could literally see her good manners kick in. She looked at her feet.

“Daddy ... I ... I sent Matt a picture of me too.”

I feigned slight surprise and gave her a peck on the nose to prevent her from feeling too guilty.

“I can understand that,” I said. “But you must not do that again, okay? You see, if we send a letter to mommy Bea and a bad person in Berlin would steal that letter they could read it. The same can happen with emails. And you wouldn’t want anyone but Matt to have that picture, would you?”

“No,” she confirmed, shaking her head. “But how did you make sure nobody stole your emails?”

I sometimes forgot how smart that kid was.

“There are methods to make it safe,” I explained. “It’s a bit like writing the letter in magic ink, so only mommy Bea can read it. Even if someone steals it, they can’t read it.”

Explaining end-to-end encryption to an eleven year old came with some challenges.

“Could you do that for me?” she asked.

“Do you want to send him more pictures?” I asked her back. She blushed and looked at her feet again.

“I wanted to send him one for every birthday until he comes here.”

“So it was a birthday present?”

She nodded.

“Jenny, that’s a sweet idea, but you can’t do that. It is illegal to have naked pictures of girls who aren’t old enough.”

Too late I realized that she had never mentioned she had been naked in that picture. Thankfully she didn’t catch on to the fact that I knew more than I let on.

“Mommy has pictures of me as a baby,” she argued.

“That’s a bit of a gray zone, every mother has baby pictures. But, you see, there are bad men out there who do nasty things to very young girls. That’s why it is illegal. You are only eleven and Matt too, so the two of you are not the problem, but the computer Matt uses belongs to his dad. He could go to jail if someone told the police that he has a picture of a naked young girl on it.”

That had been perhaps a bit too blunt as her bottom lip started quivering and she almost started to cry. I quickly gathered her up, sat her down in my lap and hugged her.

“Jenny, please ask Matt to delete that picture. If he likes you as much as you like him, he has it in his memory already anyway. You’re hard to forget.”

That made her giggle, but she quickly became serious again.

“I’ll tell him, I promise. Is that why you didn’t go into the pool with me for so long? Because it is illegal?”

“That’s a bit more complicated,” I said with a sigh. “You see, nobody would think anything of a dad and his daughter going into the pool, but you know I’m not really your daddy. The pool is no problem, but if someone saw you sitting in my lap with no clothes on, I could be in real trouble. That’s why I don’t allow it.”

“Now it makes sense,” she said and clumsily kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll write to Matt right away.”

“You do that,” I said with a smile, quite happy that this talk was behind me.

Regina

Mark was looking quite relieved, so I guessed he had had that talk with Jenny that Lydia had told me about.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Better than expected,” he said. “You should be given a medal for your parenting skills. I didn’t even have to pry it out of her. She confessed right away. If anything, that girl has a proper moral compass.”

“Flatterer,” I said and kissed him.

“For good measure, you should tell Matt’s dad though. He could really be up shit creek without a paddle in a leaking canoe. He should know how to make sure that Matt has really deleted that picture.”

“I’ve already called him, as soon as Lydia told me about it. Jeff will talk to Matt about it as well,” I said. “She just wanted to tease her sweetheart. She’s too young to understand what the consequences could have been.”

“I know,” Mark agreed. “I think she understands it now. But good grief you’re in for a turbulent time when he comes over. I give them two days before you catch them playing around with each other.”

“Lydia gave them a week,” I said with a chuckle.

“Jenny wanted to send him a picture every year for his birthday,” he said. “Can you imagine a fourteen year old boy who had a yearly documentation of his sweetheart’s boob growth? He’d be soiling his pants when he sees a naked wall.”

“Mark, you lout!” I said but I couldn’t suppress the giggle. “Have you talked her out of it?”

“I did. Little Matt will have to do with engaging his imagination. But I’m not joking, you better put Jenny on the pill in three year’s time, unless you fancy being a grandma by age twenty-nine.”

“It scares me a little,” I admitted. “This sounds way too serious for eleven year olds, and they’ve never even met each other in person.”

“They’ve been exchanging pictures for some time. Just not naked ones. I’ve had a crush on Lydia since I was eight,” Mark said. “And we turned out fine. Remember, the two of them had a fairly solid idea what to do with their lives since they were six. You can’t really compare it to us.”

Meri

Regina had told me about the talks she had had with Lydia and Mark and I was suitably impressed with Mark’s skills as her father figure. If anything, Mark was now much more relaxed around Jenny, mainly because she no longer tried to get too touchy-feely unless she was fully clothed.

That didn’t mean she held him at arms length – the opposite in fact. Mark’s lap had become her favorite place when we sat on the sofa watching TV. The poor boy actually carried a double burden as Jenny did of course have Feli in her arms while using Mark as a really comfy chair.

Right now we were watching a skiing competition in a place called Kontiolahti in Finland. Nadja had already had her first ski race, but this time we would also get to see Femke for the first time.

A wail interrupted us. Someone was hungry again. With practiced ease Regina chucked off her shirt and took our little one from Jenny.

It was testament to just how much of a niche sport skiing was in the Netherlands that Femke had not only gotten a starting spot, she was in fact the only Dutch competitor in the whole race.

Needless to say we were all on tenterhooks, Mark in particular. I knew he was sad about the relationship of Femke and Jonjo having broken up, but at the same time he had also missed her. How that boy stayed sane with his insanely complex relationships was a miracle.

You could tell Femke wasn’t your garden variety skier. Normally, cross country skiers looked more like Lydia or Nadja, and those tight-fitting outfits left little for the imagination to fill in. How those things kept the athletes warm was anyone’s guess. We had watched a few almost anorexic looking women hurtle away from the starting line when our beloved muscle monster lined up.

I could have sworn the waist of that Belarusian woman who had started just minutes ago had less circumference than Femke’s thighs and she flexed those muscles as she pushed off onto the track.

And she certainly didn’t fuck around. She was used to grind her way through thirty or more kilometers of Cycling time-trials. A five kilometer ski race wasn’t going to kill her. But whether or not she could really make an impact was an entirely different matter. Her higher weight would give her a massive disadvantage, especially if the snow was wet in warmer temperatures, and even her massive muscles could not make up for that.

Finland, thankfully, was cold, so the snow was dry and Femke powered along the track. Lydia had to run quite quickly while shouting instructions at her and we all had to giggle when she stumbled and landed face first in the snow. The Finnish coach lent her a hand to get back up after Femke had disappeared into the woods.

By the time our muscle babe reached the finish line she had given it all. With a time of 14 minutes and ten seconds, she had actually done it! It was only a 19^th place finish in the end, but it was enough to beat the Olympic norm for 2002 in her very first race, and certainly the highest finish of a Dutch skier in a long time.

We were all cheering and clapping. Feli gurgled and giggled along happily, before she hiccuped and barfed all over Jenny’s shirt.

Mark

Taking the barf attack like a trooper, Jenny cleaned up her sister’s face and handed her back to Regina for a refill, took her shirt off and went to dispose of it into the laundry basket.

“Shirt,” I said when she came back in my direction, still without one. Without even an attempt to argue, she pivoted and went upstairs to fetch a new one.

“Good parenting, buster,” Meri said with a giggle.

“Sometimes I wish I was a little less good at it,” I groaned. “She was completely flummoxed when her nipples start sticking out a bit more and now she wants everyone to see her titties. I’m not sure that’s a good deal.”

“She’ll calm down,” Meri assured me with a giggle. “I started growing at ten and was proud as a peacock. God knows how often I freaked out my dad.”

“Well, yeah, those took a few years to grow. She had to start early,” Regina said with an amused snort and pointed at Meri’s impressive rack.

Regina

Nadja competed the next day. Even I, who knew nothing about it, could see that her technique was still a bit rough around the edges. Even Femke as a fellow beginner had moved more fluidly.

She had a slight advantage that day though. Skiing, as Lydia had explained, had two techniques – a classic and a freestyle one. Femke had competed using the freestyle technique, but Nadja’s race was done using the classic technique, which looked a bit wooden, but was essentially just akin to walking really fast with skis on your feet and two poles in your hands.

As such Nadja could use her usual arm movements she was used from marathon running, and it showed. She was wasting a lot less energy than during her first race. She didn’t really have a chance to take the fight to the Norwegians or the Finnish, but a fine eleventh place was nothing to sneeze at. And since the classic style was slower than the freestyle, Lydia had managed to run alongside her in the coaching zone without ending up face-down in the snow again.