this is the life

I get them the snack they’ve been asking me to get for over an hour, finally. They rattle off questions, interupting each other and me and they bounce.  She starts to grunt, the way she does before she cries. I hurry. I pull clean dishes out of the dishwasher while I one-handed get a glass of milk for Asher.

I ask Ryan to go down to change the laundry so we have the favorite blanket clean. I don’t know why, but I always end up using the same one or two things, the ones that have no explanation for why I think they work best.

I sit down to nurse her and one or the other calls out for something. I say no not right now and they whine or fuss for waiting. I take a deep breath.

She has her days and nights mixed up. She hiccups a lot. I think she probably has more reflux than the average baby, like her brothers. She grunts and grunts when she’s lying down and tries and tries to clear her throat while thrusting out her tongue.

Her brothers are crazy about her. Totally in love with her, even though her existence has them waiting for me more often. They’re rolling with it and I’m so grateful that they’re mine.

Of course, her Daddy is crazy about her too. He thinks everything she does is magic.

It is.

She has fuzzy ears. Little tufts of hair around the edges. Cracks me right up. 

She attended her first Big Event last night. She went along to baseball, to watch her brother learn. Except she didn’t watch, she slept in the sling that my Kim sent to me. I’ll have to show you this beautiful sling sometime soon. It’s so lovely and comfortable and it makes me miss Kim even more than I already do.

There was a time when we thought we’d never go back to this stage. We were Done. I sold or gave away all of our baby things. I tried to believe myself about being done because if I didn’t, I was scared that it would just be too hard, adding another person, starting again. I used to back my way into hard phases, anything hard at all. I would scrunch my eyes closed and just try to survive. Now I realize that feeling it all is really living.

She is grunting in her sleep beside me. She has that newborn peaceful comatose sleep face on. She is wrapped tightly in a swaddle in a blanket that’s for boys. She didn’t sleep like this at all last night.

The boys are on the other side of me and they lean and touch and they talk so loud.

There is nothing empty here. It is all sound and light and too much. Too much of exactly what I want, even while I struggle not to cover my ears or scrunch my eyes. I can’t. I’ll miss something good if I do.