Important Advice

I came across this article titled "If I Could Do It All Over Again".  I read it and, of course, I was in tears by the time I finished it.  It's a very touching blog written by Carol McLeod. You can read the whole article if you click HERE.

"If I Could Do It All Over Again" is written in honor of all of the moms who have chosen to walk the very brave road of larger families. Whether you have a small family or a large family, Carol shares advice from the heart - advice that every mom (and dad) could benefit from.  

This article was beautifully written and while I think all of the advice is important and worthy, the pieces I am going to share are the ones that 'got me'... 

1. Don't ever feel guilty about everything that you aren’t able to do during this season (season of raising your children) but know that you are doing the most important things in life.

I remember one day when my highly successful, beautifully dressed mother walked into my zoo of a house filled with children. There were toys everywhere, the floor was sticky and the dishes hadn’t been done in days. That’s right … I said, “days”.  I was sitting in the middle of the family room floor reading books to my three boys when she walked in. I looked at her and said, “Mom, I am so sorry that my house looks like this.” She sat down on the couch, started folding the mountain of laundry and said, “That’s o.k., honey, you are doing the important things in life.”

At the end of every long, busy day, remind yourself, “That’s o.k., Sarah, you are doing the important things in life.”

Your children can never have too much of you. You are all that matters to them.

2. When a mom snuggles with an infant, for no other reason than just because I love you and want you, it builds a garrison of strength around that baby’s heart that no weapon of the culture can penetrate.

3. Start reading to them from the day you bring them home from the hospital. Read “Pat the Bunny”, “I’ll Love You Forever”, “Good Night, Moon”, and the Bible.  Even though they may not understand the meaning of the words … they will understand the love and cadence in your voice.

4. Don’t make your home such a serious place that it lacks the healing power of joy and gladness.  There can never be too much laughter in a home!

5.  You only have 18 short years with him. 18 summers … 18 birthday cakes … 18 Christmas Eves that will fly away in a mere blink of time.  Read to him … sing to him … prioritize him … laugh with him … pray with Him … dream with him … hold him.

*sigh*

Compassion

For Adam

By Glennon Melton

Dear Chase,

Hey, baby.

Tomorrow is a big day. Third Grade – wow.

Chase – When I was in third grade, there was a little boy in my class named Adam.

Adam looked a little different and he wore funny clothes and sometimes he even smelled a little bit. Adam didn’t smile. He hung his head low and he never looked at anyone at all. Adam never did his homework. I don’t think his parents reminded him like yours do. The other kids teased Adam a lot. Whenever they did, his head hung lower and lower and lower. I never teased him, but I never told the other kids to stop, either.

And I never talked to Adam, not once. I never invited him to sit next to me at lunch, or to play with me at recess. Instead, he sat and played by himself. He must have been very lonely.

I still think about Adam every day. I wonder if Adam remembers me? Probably not. I bet if I’d asked him to play, just once, he’d still remember me.

I think that God puts people in our lives as gifts to us. The children in your class this year, they are some of God’s gifts to you.
So please treat each one like a gift from God. Every single one.

Baby, if you see a child being left out, or hurt, or teased, a part of your heart will hurt a little. Your daddy and I want you to trust that heart-ache. Your whole life, we want you to notice and trust your heart-ache. That heart ache is called compassion, and it is God’s signal to you to do something. It is God saying, Chase! Wake up! One of my babies is hurting! Do something to help! Whenever you feel compassion – be thrilled! It means God is speaking to you, and that is magic. It means He trusts you and needs you.

Sometimes the magic of compassion will make you step into the middle of a bad situation right away.

Compassion might lead you to tell a teaser to stop it and then ask the teased kid to play. You might invite a left-out kid to sit next to you at lunch. You might choose a kid for your team first who usually gets chosen last. These things will be hard to do, but you can do hard things.

Sometimes you will feel compassion but you won’t step in right away. That’s okay, too. You might choose instead to tell your teacher and then tell us. We are on your team – we are on your whole class’s team. Asking for help for someone who is hurting is not tattling, it is doing the right thing. If someone in your class needs help, please tell me, baby. We will make a plan to help together.

When God speaks to you by making your heart hurt for another, by giving you compassion, just do something. Please do not ignore God whispering to you. I so wish I had not ignored God when He spoke to me about Adam. I remember Him trying, I remember feeling compassion, but I chose fear over compassion. I wish I hadn’t. Adam could have used a friend and I could have, too.

Chase – We do not care if you are the smartest or fastest or coolest or funniest. There will be lots of contests at school, and we don’t care if you win a single one of them. We don’t care if you get straight As. We don’t care if the girls think you’re cute or whether you’re picked first or last for kickball at recess. We don’t care if you are your teacher’s favorite or not. We don’t care if you have the best clothes or most Pokemon cards or coolest gadgets. We just don’t care.

We don’t send you to school to become the best at anything at all. We already love you as much as we possibly could. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can’t lose it. That’s done.

We send you to school to practice being brave and kind.

Kind people are brave people. Brave is not a feeling that you should wait for. It is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.

Trust me, baby, it is. It is more important.

Don’t try to be the best this year, honey.

Just be grateful and kind and brave. That’s all you ever need to be.

Take care of those classmates of yours, and your teacher, too. You Belong to Each Other. You are one lucky boy . . . with all of these new gifts to unwrap this year.

I love you so much that my heart might explode.

Enjoy and cherish your gifts.

And thank you for being my favorite gift of all time.

Love,

Mama

*********

*sigh*

"It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear..."

What a great reminder and wonderful lesson.
With compassion being a value tha I want to instill in my children, these are words that I will be holding onto to help me...


To read more wonderful words from Glennon visit

Momastery

-where we practice living bigger, bolder, and truer on this Earth.  Where we remember what we already know:

We can do hard things.

Love wins.

We belong to each other.

The Mom Stays In The Picture

I still have to write about our New Years Eve celebration and Mason's night out with daddy, but I'll work on those tomorrow.  Today, I want to share something that I ran across...something that I found to be very important - words that stung me with truth.

Taken from Allison Tate's "The Mom Stays In The Picture" - 

 I avoid photographic evidence of my existence these days. To be honest, I avoid even mirrors. When I see myself in pictures, it makes me wince. I know I am far from alone; I know that many of my friends also avoid the camera.

It seems logical. We're sporting mama bodies and we're not as young as we used to be. We don't always have time to blow dry our hair, apply make-up, perhaps even bathe (ducking). The kids are so much cuter than we are; better to just take their pictures, we think.

But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons need to see how young and beautiful and human their mamas were. Our daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves -- women, mamas, people living lives. Avoiding the camera because we don't like to see our own pictures? How can that be okay?

Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen. People, including my children, don't see the way I make sure my kids' favorite stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don't know how I walk the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them for a special day. They don't know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little hospital bracelets in keepsake boxes high on the top shelves of their closets. They don't see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am doing an okay job as a mother, if they are okay in their schools, where we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their birthdays. I'm up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and eating cookies and milk, and I spend hours hunting the Internet and the local Targets for specially-requested Halloween costumes and birthday presents. They don't see any of that.

Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the week's parent reader or planning the class Valentine's Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (ear infections, croup, rotavirus).

I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won't be here -- and I don't know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now -- but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother.

When I look at pictures of my own mother, I don't look at cellulite or hair debacles. I just see her -- her kind eyes, her open-mouthed, joyful smile, her familiar clothes. That's the mother I remember. My mother's body is the vessel that carries all the memories of my childhood. I always loved that her stomach was soft, her skin freckled, her fingers long. I didn't care that she didn't look like a model. She was my mama.

So when all is said and done, if I can't do it for myself, I want to do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are.

Poem, Patch, And 'Pointment.

We're getting down to the nitty gritty of this pregnancy...

to the point that I am actually starting to feel pregnant.

I may not be "big" and I may not have put on a lot of "extra pounds", but I still have this little human being growing inside of me.  The pressure in my pelvis is strong.  The weight of this baby is heavy.  I dread trying to shave my legs, it's a workout to put my tennis shoes on in the morning, and it's nearly impossible to put on a pair of panty hose!  Thank goodness I get to wear scrubs every day to work and not have to dress up with hose!  Whewie!  I had to wear a pair for a wedding last weekend and I'm still trying to catch my breath from putting them on!

I had another doctor's appointment this morning and all went well!  This morning, I had the joy of getting tested for a bacteria called Group B Streptococci. 

Quoted from "Babble":

"Your doctor is probably going to test you for group B strep soon, which is a bacterium naturally found in 10 to 35 percent of all healthy women (not a sexually transmitted disease), and is unrelated to the type of strep that gives you a sore throat. It causes no symptoms and no problems for adults, but it can be very serious for a newborn that might pick up the infection on his/her way out of the birth canal, causing blood infection or meningitis. If you test positive (after a simple cotton-swab smear of the vagina, cervix and rectum), all it means is you'll be administered IV antibiotics during labor." 

*Note - the only reason I have included this description is for when my girls are grown and experiencing their own pregnancies, they can look back and see the difference in what doctors did today compared to how things will be done 20+ years from now.  I have always tested positive for Group B Strep and have had to be on antibiotics during labor and delivery.*

And besides getting swabbed, we did the usual - pee in a cup, weigh (just one pound off of my goal weight!), and listen to baby's heartbeat! 

While sitting in the office waiting to be seen, I saw a poster hanging on the wall...and I have no idea why I saw it this morning over all of the other times I've been in the office.  

I like things like this - It's a good poem and I try to live by these words everyday!

Children Are....

Author: Meiji Steward

Amazing, acknowledge them.

Believable, trust them.

Childlike, allow them.

Divine, honor them.

Energetic, nourish them.

Fallible, embrace them.

Gifts, treasure them.

Here now, be with them.

Innocent, delight with them.

Joyful, appreciate them.

Kindhearted, learn from them.

Lovable, cherish them.

Magical, fly with them.

Noble, esteem them.

Open minded, respect them.

Precious, value them.

Questioners, encourage them.

Resourceful, support them.

Spontaneous, enjoy them.

Talented, believe in them.

Unique, affirm them.

Vulnerable, protect them.

Whole, recognize them.

Xtraspecial, celebrate them.

Yearning, notice them.

Zany, laugh with them.

Pictures and Poem

It has been calculated that in 2012 the cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 costs $235,000 for a middle income family!

$235,000 x 3 

Wow!...and that doesn't even touch college tuition.

$235,000 per child isn't so bad if you break it down...

$13055.55 per year

$1087.96 per month

$253.01 per week

$36.15 per day

...still, you might think that the best financial advice is; don't have children if you want to be "rich". Actually, it is just the opposite.  

Parenting is the hardest thing in the world, but the rewards are rich...!

Cost of Raising A Child

~author unknown

What do you get for your $235,000 (x3 in our family...*gulp*)?

Naming rights: First, Middle, and Last! 

Glimpses of God every day.

Giggles under the cover every night.

More love than your heart can hold.

Butterfly kisses and velcro hugs.

Endless wonder over rocks, ants, clouds, and warm cookies.

A hand to hold...usually covered with jelly or chocolate.

A partner for blowing bubbles and flying kites.

Someone to laugh yourself silly with, no matter what the boss said or how your stocks performed that day.

For $235,000, you never have to grow up.
You get to:

finger paint,

carve pumpkins,

play hide-and-seek,

catch lightning bugs, 

...never stop believing in Santa Claus 

You have an excuse to:

keep reading the Adventures of Piglet and Pooh,

watch Saturday morning cartoons,

go to Disney movies, 

and wish on stars...

You get to frame rainbows, hearts, and flowers under refrigerator magnets...

and collect spray pain noodle wreaths for Christmas,

hand prints set in clay for Mother's Day,

and cards with backwards letters for Father's Day.

For a mere $36.15 a day, there is no greater bang for your buck.  You get to be a hero just for:

retrieving a frisbee off the garage roof,

taking the training wheels off a bike,

removing a splinter,

filling a wading pool,

coaxing a wad of gum out of bangs,

and coaching a baseball team that never wins but always gets treated to ice cream regardless.

You get a front row seat in history to witness the:

First step,

First word,

First joke,

First date,

First time behind the wheel...

You get to be immortal.

You get another branch added to your family tree, and if you're lucky, a long list of limbs in your obituary called grandchildren and great grandchildren.  You get an education in psychology, nursing, criminal justice, communications, and human sexuality that no college can match.

In the eyes of a child, you rank right up there under God.  You have all the power to heal a boo-boo, scare away the monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police a slumber party, ground them forever, and love them without limits, so one day they will, like you, love without counting the cost.  This is quite a deal for the price.

...it's the best investment you'll ever make!

 Pictures at the train station - 9/18/12
Makayla - 4 years old

Mason - 2 years old

Baby girl _______ - 2 months before her arrival

Kairos

Here's another one of those blogs where I'm sharing the words of somebody else.  These words come from Momastery.  I really liked what she had to say and wanted to pass it along!

I'm only going to share a few paragraphs of what she had to say, but to me they were the most important. 

This is how Momastery describes parenting:

I think parenting young children (and old ones, I’ve heard) is a little like climbing Mount Everest. Brave, adventurous souls try it because they’ve heard there’s magic in the climb. They try because they believe that finishing, or even attempting the climb are impressive accomplishments. They try because during the climb, if they allow themselves to pause and lift their eyes and minds from the pain and drudgery, the views are breathtaking. They try because even though it hurts and it’s hard, there are moments that make it worth the hard. These moments are so intense and unique that many people who reach the top start planning, almost immediately, to climb again. Even though any climber will tell you that  most of the climb is treacherous, exhausting, killer. That they literally cried most of the way up.

**Then she goes on to describe the two types of "time" in the parenting world:**

There are two different types of time. Chronos time is what we live in. It’s regular time, it’s one minute at a time, it’s staring down the clock till bedtime time, it’s ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, it’s four screaming minutes in time out time, it’s two hours till daddy gets home time. Chronos is the hard, slow passing time we parents often live in.

Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. Kairos is those magical moments in which time stands still. I have a few of those moments each day, and I cherish them.

Like when I actually stop what I’m doing and really look at Tish. I notice how perfectly smooth and brownish her skin is.  I notice the perfect curves of her teeny elf mouth and her asianish brown eyes, and I breathe in her soft Tishy smell. In these moments, I see that her mouth is moving but I can’t hear her because all I can think is – This is the first time I’ve really seen Tish all day, and my God – she is so beautiful. Kairos.

Like when I’m stuck in chronos time in the grocery line and I’m haggard and annoyed and angry at the slow check-out clerk. And then I look at my cart and I’m transported out of chronos. And suddenly I notice the piles of healthy food I’ll feed my children to grow their bodies and minds and I remember that most of the world’s mamas would kill for this opportunity. This chance to stand in a grocery line with enough money to pay. And I just stare at my cart. At the abundance. The bounty. Thank you, God. Kairos.

Or when I curl up in my cozy bed with Theo asleep at my feet and Craig asleep by my side and I listen to  them both breathing. And for a moment, I think- how did a girl like me get so lucky? To go to bed each night surrounded by this breath, this love, this peace, this warmth? Kairos.

These kairos moments leave as fast as they come- but I mark them. I say the word kairos in my head each time I leave chronos. And at the end of the day, I don’t remember exactly what my kairos moments were, but I remember I had them. And that makes the pain of the daily parenting climb worth it.

If I had a couple Kairos moments during the day, I call it a success.

Of course when I was done reading all that she had to write, I had to look up the word "Kairos".  I am always looking things up to gain a better understanding and up until today, I had never even heard of the word Kairos!  Under Wikipedia, this is what it says:

Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment).The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.

I guess I've never really looked at parenting in this way, but I've realized that's what I've been doing this whole time. Fortunately, it is very easy for me to live in kairos time.  I'm good at stepping outside and seeing the magic.  When times get hard or frustrating, it's easy for me to stop, take in a deep breath, and be thankful. It just seems like the natural thing to do!

Not My Words 2

At night, when the kids go to bed, I have "my time".  I use that time by picking up the house, catching up on shows, or reading my favorite blogs.  Well, the other night, Kevin caught me bawling at the computer.  I ran into a blog that broke my heart into a million pieces...and I wasn't just bawling - I was sobbing and sobbing loudly.  I was a mess!!

I don't even know why I am passing along this story - except for the fact that it is so beautifully written - written to the point that you can feel the pain so intensely - and when I was done reading it, I said a little prayer to God and thanked Him for what He has given us. I went upstairs and kissed my babies.  I stroked Mason's soft cheeks and tucked Makayla's hair behind her ear.  It's stories like this that help to remind me how blessed I am.  

After reading this story, you can find out more about Amy at Transplanted Thoughts.

Here are some ways that Amy has been described:

"Amy has lived through more unspeakable sadness than many of us can even begin to imagine. Her story is unfathomable and overwhelming. Her story inspires and brings hope.Her story exemplifies survival and optimism. To say that she is strong diminishes her. To say that she is brave doesn’t begin to cover it. Amy is a survivor…she is truly remarkable."

That morning

 

Posted by Amy on February 3, 2011

As you can imagine, this was a difficult post to write, I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to post it. It deals with the morning David died and it’s raw. Raw and emotional and I thought it best to say so, upfront, just in case you’re not up to shouldering some of the hurt. Because there’s a lot of hurt.

It had been a long night. Ever since he had aspirated the blood on Saturday morning, he had been having episodes of decreased oxygenation and increased levels of CO2.

His lungs were no longer working properly.

There had been talk of the oscillator, but they had tried to hold off as long as possible. By 6am, they couldn’t wait any longer. There was no choice left but to put him on life support.

At that point, I knew with the utmost certainty that I would lose my Capt Snuggles.

I just didn’t know it would be within the next 6 hours.

The oscillator is a horrible apparatus, it is a piston based machine that creates constant motion. It caused David’s entire body to vibrate non-stop. It was a jarring presence in the peaceful atmosphere I tried so hard to hold on to.

By 8:30am he was having some drops in blood pressure and heart-rate, something he’d been doing sporadically. They needed to place an arterial line and start support meds for his heart. Everyone was very calm, business as usual.

I hadn’t left to take a shower the day before, so I left to go to the RMH for a quick shower and maybe a bite to eat. I’d only gotten 2 hours of sleep – I needed a boost for the day ahead.

At 9:10, just as I was getting ready to leave the RMH, one of the nurses called and said the words I wasn’t prepared for “I think you need to come back, now.”

I ran.

I dodged through the people in the concourse, I swept past the guards stationed in front of the elevators – by now they no longer asked for proof that I was allowed up – and I’m sure with my wild-eyed, frantic appearance – they knew I needed to hurry through.

I tried to catch my breath in the elevator, I was scared and alone. I knew I may have to face this all by myself – my husband was an hour and a half away. I took a deep breath and walked into the throng of people that had gathered outside our room.

I knew when I saw our transplant coordinator, this was it.

She offered to call my husband and I let her, I knew I couldn’t find the words to tell him he needed to be here, now.

I watched as they worked over him, the images are so firmly etched in my head that I see them whenever I close my eyes. I’d seen them bag him before, but never with the urgency I saw at that moment. The Attending doctor pulled me into the hallway to talk. Ironically this is the same Attending that admitted us, all those months ago. We hadn’t seen him since.

He explained to me that there comes a time to decide. To differentiate between doing things for him and doing things to him. We were no longer doing things for him. I understood and all I could say was, My husband’s not here, can we hang on until he arrives?

Then he coded.

His heart stopped. I replay the words over and over again in my head, his heart stopped and then suddenly, with an increased frenetic pace, the Attending began chest compressions. Again and again and again, I wanted to shout Enough! Enough already! Please stop! But I didn’t. I let them continue, his

Daddy wasn’t there and I couldn’t let him go by myself.

Some how, they brought him back. Not David, not really, not my Capt Snuggles. I think he took flight the minute his heart stopped.  But they kick-started his heart and kept blowing air into his lungs until his Daddy arrived.

Which he did shortly, by now it was almost 11am. The doctors gathered and ushered us into a small conference room. They said everything I already knew. I looked at each one of them telling me all these things and it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter that they all loved him, because I’m sure that they did. It didn’t matter that they did the best they could, because I know that they tried. It didn’t matter that they thought I was a good mother, because I still couldn’t change the outcome. None of what they said mattered.

All I could think of was that in a few minutes I would be allowed to finally hold my son and it would be the last time, and it wouldn’t be enough.

It would never be enough.

We returned to the room. They brought in a rocking chair and I held him. I held him while that awful oscillator vibrated and vibrated and vibrated and finally, I told my Hub to get the nurse – I was ready, I wanted, needed them to turn off that awful machine, just so I could hold him in peace.

They came. The drips keeping his heart pumping were stopped. That awful machine was turned off and they removed the breathing tube from his nose. I was finally able to look at my sweet boys’ face without the tape and tubes.

He was finally free of it all.

And I held him.

I held him when the Attending came in to listen for his heartbeat. I held him when the Attending called out 12:15. I held him while they left us alone and I cried. I cried for all the hurt and pain that he had endured. I cried for all the lost hope and the pure senselessness of the whole situation. I cried for the boy that would never grow old and I cried for the emptiness and brokenness that would haunt me for the rest of my days.

I cried until I thought I was empty and then I cried some more, just like a cut that starts to clot, but if you bump it, it starts to bleed again.

I thought that I may never stop bleeding.

Finally, I laid David back on the bed and I covered him with his blanket. Our Chaperone came in and asked if I would like to help her bathe him.

And I did.

Before we bathed him, we took imprints of his feet and hands, both on a heart shaped mold and on paper. I trimmed a lock of his hair to keep tucked away.

Then we washed all traces of blood and tears away from Capt Snuggles. We rubbed baby lotion on his arms and legs and his sweet face, just like he was getting ready for sleep. We dressed him and wrapped him in his blanket.

I bent down and kissed his forehead, more tears than I ever thought possible, streaming down my face.
I had to leave, it was more than time. It may very well be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. To put one foot in front of the other and walk out of that hospital room. To walk out and leave my Capt Snuggles behind.

To walk out and leave my heart behind.

Not My Words 1

I am going to start sharing stories that I love - stories that touch my heart - stories that I can completely relate to - stories that make me laugh and stories that make me cry.  Stories that need to be shared.

I am going to title these posts "Not My Words".

The first story I am going to share, is written by Julie and titled "Petal Lashes".  You can find more of her great stories over at Julie C Gardner.

I think the best gift you can ever give your child, God willing, is a sibling.  They will have each other and know each and love each other forever. 

The last days of being a mother of one.  I'll never forget. 

My favorite words written by Julie...

"There is irony in loving one child so much you feel compelled to create another. I trust my heart to multiply. My time I will divide. But he? Is not yet capable of solving such equations."

Enjoy! Here it is:

Petal Lashes — by Julie

The petal lashes blink once, twice.  A third time.

I don’t believe you, his blue eyes say.

This is what he knows:

There is a bed in my room now.  Next to my crib.
I pull tufts from my blanket, white balls that look like bubbles.
Mama’s belly is hard and tight, bigger than it used to be.
I want grilled cheese for lunch.  But I am not hungry.  Yet.

We are on my bed, my son furled into me like a conch shell.  When his father’s out of town for work, we slip easily into crankiness.  We are both of us out of sorts.  I’ve scooped him from his pile of toys, a discarded sippy cup tipped over on the who-cares carpet.  It’s time for an impromptu snuggle.

“Just the two of us,” I say.  His second birthday is a month away, but mother-time still teases me.  Long minutes drag while days slip through my grasping fingers.


How do I make room for another?  Why did I steal his babyhood?  What words might reassure my firstborn that his world may be different but this fierce, complicated love for him will never change?

We have told him this:

You are our first baby.
We love you. Very much.
A new person is coming to stay with us.

Here’s what he believes:

Tummies are for fishy crackers.
And cheerios.
Not people.
Daddy will be home soon.

He pushes on the bulging drum of my stomach, nudging closer.  I cradle him with one arm, reaching across my body with the other to stroke his silky blonde hair.  The fluff of him tickles my rough palm.  We are warm together here and the day slows.  I do not hear the clock ticking, the second hand arcing and unstoppable.

I say, “You’re my Hunny Bunny,” and he juts his chin in protest.  “No!” His lips purse in a pretend pout.  “You’re my Hunny Bunny.”  He giggles and I pull him into me.  He smells like baby shampoo.  And certainty.  He rests his head on my belly and there is no space between us.


I’m sorry my sweetheart.  So sorry.

There is irony in loving one child so much you feel compelled to create another. I trust my heart to multiply.  My time I will divide.  But he?  Is not yet capable of solving such equations.  He counts on his fingers.  And on my complete attention.  One hundred percent of me will soon be split.  My unborn child prepares to claim her half of me.

Without warning, she kicks from the inside, a tiny poke against his cheek.  My boy sucks in breath, his mouth a wide O of astonishment.  He pushes at her and she returns the pressure.  An elbow?  A foot?

My children meeting for the first time.

She shifts, a rolling heave beneath her brother.  She is somehow both closer to me and also more separate. 

But we are together still.  Just the three of us.

My son, not yet two, tilts his face toward me.  Every curve and angle of him open to discovery.  His eyes lock with mine.  Petal lashes blink once, twice.  A third time.

And he believes.