You can read the whole chapter on the Iowa History Site ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ GRANDMOTHER BROWN'S HUNDRED YEARS CHAPTER IV EARLY MARRIED LIFE "Tell me something about the home in Ames where you first went to housekeeping, Grandmother Brown," I begged. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "We were married in October, and the next October Willie was here. I had grown up among babies and cared for them when only a child myself, and yet I was hardly prepared for the ordeal that awaited me. Even my baby clothes' didn't seem to be quite right. Ma laughed when I showed them to her. 'Why, my dear, did you measure the cat?' she exclaimed. 'They are so tiny.' "And Willie was a big, bouncing boy who nearly killed me as he tore his way into life. Ma was not with me then, only an aunt of Dan'l's and his cousin's wife. The doctor who attended me was a bad man and drunken. First, he bled me - think of it! Then, after he had taken a pint of my blood, he gave me a cup of ergot to hasten labor. I was young and strong and he was anxious to be off. When my agony could go no further, I lost consciousness. All I remember is seeing my hands drawing up in front of my eyes. 'Oh, if they'll just drop me down, down into that black hole, oh, if they only will,' I agonized, 'it will be all right.' When I came to, I heard a baby cry. 'Your beautiful baby!' they told me.' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Two years later came Gus. He was so good-natured and smiling, the loveliest baby! He's a good boy yet. None of my babies was hard to get along with except Lizzie. She wanted me to hold her in my arms all the time. Gus was so fat that when I tied a ribbon around his wrist you couldn't see anything but the bow. I had to be so careful of him to keep him from being chafed and chapped all the time! Such creases in his legs! Such dimples in his back! We had no talcum powder in those days. My mother used to scorch flour, holding it on a shovel over the fire, and rub it on the babies, and I would tear old handkerchiefs into strips and lay them in the creases of Gussie's fat little body. We had no safety pins! It was necessary to be so careful in the dressing of the little children! "These were my four little Buckeyes, all born in Ohio before I was twenty-eight. Later, in Iowa, I had four little Hawkeyes. The last one, your Herbert, was born two months before my forty-third birthday. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "I found that to keep a baby quiet feathers were great playthings; feathers, or a basket of poppies from the garden that would make them drowsy. Willie was afraid at first of a feather from the bed that floated around the room. But afterward a feather that clung to a drop of honey on his finger amused him for hours. Once when Gus had been very quiet for a long time I found, to my dismay, that he had been picking some little white buttons off their card. He had calmly swallowed the whole dozen, - there was the stripped card as evidence, - but we got them again and Gus was none the worse." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "It was a considerable undertaking, in those days, to move one's family from Ohio to Iowa. There were no railroads to carry us across country and we had to go by steamboat down the Hocking River to the Ohio, down the Ohio to St. Louis, and then up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, and overland the rest of the way by carriage. We were twenty days on the journey. But compared with what our grandparents had had to overcome in moving from Massachusetts to New York and Vermont, and from those places to Ohio, it was nothing. And then I never thought about its being hard. I was used to things being hard. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Debbie Clough Gerischer Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ IAGENWEB: Special History Project: http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm Gerischer Family Web Site: http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/