Oh hey! We had a baby.
Louisa Kate - a second daughter, a little sister. We have two girls.
I complain about grind of parenting because it's exhausting and all-consuming, and also because I'm really very good at complaining, but in all honesty, this little babe has healed up my soul. I fought tooth and nail to have these children and the journey left me fragile and bitter. When Louisa was finally born at forty weeks and four days late, after a nightmare of fertility treatments and losses, I felt like I was breathing for the first time in two years. She slipped into our family like water, filling up all the cracks and the dry patches. Now did I recently tell Joshua that I would sell a kidney for one day completely alone in total silence? Yes, it was last Friday and both girls were being obnoxious and I meant it. But at the same time I have this deep, profound gratitude for the fact that I even get to want to be alone. These girls, they were the challenge of my life before they were even two pink lines on a pregnancy test. And now they're here and they're gorgeous and healthy and stubborn and one sleeps like a newborn even though she's eight months old and one asked me the other night why she can't hug God and how can he be real if she can't see him in her world and just, whoa. The little things are the big things, right?
And they won't stop growing up either.
Matilda will be four years old this week. FOUR! Four feels very far removed from babyhood, even from toddlerhood. She falls asleep in the wildest, limbs akimbo positions and she is just so very long. She's lost so much of her...roundness? She is curious about things like death and how caterpillars become butterflies and if she doesn't understand something she asks, "Say that again, Mommy? Tell me again?" until she gets it, and then she tells her facts and tidbits to every single person she sees for the rest of the day. She is terrified of armadillos for reasons we cannot even fathom, having grown up in an armadillo-free zip code, and she is enamored of her preschool teachers and her school friends and sweet childhood things like being the line leader.
Louisa is eight months old and is our string bean baby - probably because she has never stopped moving for a minute in her entire short life. It really doesn't seem right that the only person in our family to have defined abs is the baby. She achieved those after months of laying on her back and trying to sit straight up using only her core muscles, flapping her arms and legs frantically. In other words, Pilates. She's crawling now, a kind of modified crawl, crawl, slither, roll over, sit up, crawl, crawl, repeat situation. She pulls up on everything, has two teeth, a mop of fuzzy curls, and she is the founding member and president of the Matilda Fan Club. She claps and grins for everything her big sister does and looks at us like, DID YOU SEE THAT WOW SHE IS SO GREAT AT TALKING BACK TO YOU! GOOD JOB!
They are really pure joy wrapped up in smooshy little bodies. With bows on top. So many bows.
I need to write again because it's been too long, not just on here, but this is a good place to (re)start. Now that Matilda is old to understand what Joshua and I do for our livings, it suddenly feels so important to show her that there's making money and then there's investing in the things you do well and fulfill you. If those are already the exact same thing for you, then YES! You are nailing it, and I'm jealous. We aren't one hundred percent there yet. Or even fifty percent. Parenting is so good and fulfilling, but it's also not the sum total of what I do, so here I am doing something else. Just little words on a little page, even if most of them are still about my kids and my mama life.
Work in progress.
