here are 10 children at the foster home where I work. By law, I am not allowed to tell you any of their real names, but occasionally, when the mood hits, I want to introduce you to them. I know that children in a foster home might not be as exciting as, say, traveling through South America. I know the burdens they inherited at birth, while stunning, might make you feel kind of uncomfortable or guilty. Maybe even bored. I know sick kids make for klunky copy. I too fear the dreaded "children with a fatal illness" genre.
But I think it could be fun. I've been klunky and cliched before, and besides, I think you might find the world of modern-day foster homes more twisted and complex and unsettling than you expected. At least I did.
So let's start with the smallest ones, shall we? Let's start with Fat Cheeks.

When Fat Cheeks was born, he was the size of a dollar bill. Two pounds. He could fit in the palm of your hand. His mother, by some accounts a prostitute and by others mentally handicapped, abandoned him at the hospital. She couldn't take it. He was just too small.
So Fat Cheeks spent four months in a hospital incubator, fed through an IV stuck in his head. You can still see the scabs on his black head, otherwise covered in soft fuzz like a puppy dog's belly. Right in the center is a shaved patch and a pinprick of a scab. It's the second thing I noticed about him. The first thing, of course, was the cheeks.
People have to touch the cheeks or comment on the cheeks or kiss them or pinch them somehow.
"That babies cheeks are kind of big," people say when they first meet him.
The children living at the home are not so polite.
"That baby is too fat," they say, poking one of his double chins.
"Is that baby retarded?"
But we don't know yet. Maybe he is, maybe he's just a fat-faced baby.
I think the cheeks are just so striking because the rest of him is so dinky. At four months old, he weighs seven pounds. Actually, Fat Cheeks is due next week.
That kind of freaks me out.
Fat Cheeks is due next week, so he has been living on borrowed time. That whole nine-month-stay in the womb, he cut it short by four. So really, he is -7 days old. Sometimes I get excited about what this means, to not officially be born yet. Maybe he could smoke a bunch of cigarettes or lay in tanning booths all day long or at least order a bunch of stuff from the Home Shopping Network and never have to pay. But then I remember that Fat Cheeks is a baby, who mostly just sleeps and poops and sometimes opens his eyes for a second and then, rather unimpressed, goes back to sleep.