Asher’s Birthday Present

First I’ll let him tell you about it:

And then I’ll show you this:

And finally, I’ll say this:

To borrow from Paul McCartney (and for the record, one of my least favorite Beatles songs) it’s been a long and winding road to make the leap from a family of three to a family of four. On the one hand, I anticipated this happening much, much sooner and on the other, it’s overwhelming (but exciting!) to be thinking about a new person in our lives. In the way that these things go, we are getting exactly what we’ve dreamed about, but we also have no idea what that dream means. I remember feeling this way when I was pregnant with Asher, knowing that we were realizing a shared hope, but also having the sense that I was searching in the dark for a flashlight every time that I tried to imagine our new life ahead. That seems to be the way with pregnancy, we wait and wait, and then there’s a first breath, and suddenly the flashlight is in your hand and all of the answers are found in the beam of that new-life light.

I remember my sweet friend Katie visiting us when Asher was younger and as I was giving him a bath and she asked me how I learned how to bathe him. I didn’t have an answer, because as it turns out, we stitch together a heavy blanket of knowledge about our children, embellishing with shared stories, research, observation, what our children teach us about their needs, and intuition. Before having one child I had no idea if I knew how to give a baby a bath. Now I will have two, and all I can do is wait patiently to discover what else it is that I have to learn, and then laugh at myself one day when I realize that I’m doing exactly the thing I never knew I could. My clever cousin told me over Easter weekend that he’s removed the phrase, “I can’t imagine” from his speech because we can always imagine…perhaps not accurately or with great clarity, but we can always tap into that possibility, and we undermine ourselves when we assume that we can’t. I would have loved this conversation any time, but I don’t think that he could have known that he was giving my pregnant brain a little life boat by reminding me that all this daydreaming that I’m doing is just another joy of being human.

So in September, on or around September 23rd to be exact, another little light will click on in our lives and we will start down the path of siblings and nighttime feedings and deep breaths of that newborn aphrodisiac, and just like that, three will become four. Here’s to you little one, to your days ahead on the inside as you prepare for the world out here, and to the great imaginings of this life. May your journey continue to be a safe and peaceful one.

And yes, I promise that I will keep feeding you watermelon.