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Today my Emme Rose turns one.
It wasn’t an easy thing to decide to bring another child into an already bustling family of 6. But, to be honest, my heart would not rest… I could not stop yearning for another baby. We found out that I was pregnant on the 4th of July 2008. And to be honest, we were not 100% prepared for the news. To say she was “unplanned” would be acting like a teenager – in other words, we knew what we were doing. But, the news still had a bit of a “wow” factor to it.
She came into this world and immediately changed it. When I look at my two babies, I can say I love them the same amount. That my depth of love for Ty and for Emme both runs deep, fathomless, to the heavens and back again. But whereas my love for Ty could be described as moonlight — all mystical and magical and mysterious — my love for Emme is a sunrise — bright and celebratory and joyful.
Emme at 1 Week Old by Jessica Nichols
She has taught me many many things.
Lately she has taught me that no matter how often I sweep and mop (even with my uber shark steam mop) she will find that infinitesimal speck from 20 feet away, crawl her chubby little bum right off to get to it, and consume it before any of the 6 of us can stop her.
Mostly, she has taught me that no matter what I “expect” she is going to suprise me. She put me into labor only 6 hours before my planned (yes, the “no labor” planned) C-section. I can put her down in the crib WIDE AWAKE and walk away from her and she will roll over and go to sleep for 14 hours. This still has a shock factor for us.
Although my husband was overwhelmed and worried about bringing another child into our life, he took one look at her and fell madly in love. She is drawn to him to the exclusion of others. She will smile so big sometimes that I think her face is going to break. I have never smiled like that. And, I am sure that I have never felt the joy that she feels, the exuberance for life that she exudes from all her little chubby, yummy parts. She literaly and figuratively spreads her arms wide and grabs hold of the world around her and then devours it… me… with her smile, with her sense of hope, with her pure sweetness.
I did not expect any of that. I did not expect that I would love her so much. I did not expect that there would once again be a person in my life that I cannot live without.
I did not expect that Ty would want to suck on her toes and calls her “his baby“. Or that Jade would stare into her eyes, turn to me, and exclaim, “We are so lucky to have her!” Or that Izzy would invent games to teach her how to put that darn Cheerio into her mouth. Or that Lily would crawl around on the floor, following her around the house just to keep her safe.
So, today is Emme’s birthday.
We named her Emme because the meaning of her name is “complete” or “whole.” And that is what she made this family…complete….whole.
Emme Rose
Happy birthday, sweet girl.
In addition to teaching high school science, my husband coaches competitive year-round swimming.
This past weekend, Dave was at a swim meet all weekend long. One of the major drawbacks to the teacher-coaching gig, is that 1 to 2 times per month, Dave is gone for huge lengths of time at a swim meet. Like 10-12 hours per day. It is a drain on me at home. After going all week being “on” with the kids, it is absolutely brutal to go all weekend with no husband, only to face another week.
During the swim meet three weeks ago, I finally hit the wall at 3pm on Sunday. Every time I walked out of the room – -even to pee — I burst into tears. My texts to him started to take on a fatalist tone, “Someone is not going to make it if you do not get home soon!” “Did you get my last text?” “H.E.L.P.!“ Finally, I made that desperate wife phone call that I am pretty sure we all have made at least once and begged him to come home and, luckily, he was able to duck out an hour early. An hour that certainly saved my life and maybe even the life of a child or two.
So, prior to this meet, I tried to be a bit more proactive. My first approach was to call Grandma Bloo and get her over here! Then we made plans. To LEAVE the house. For a hermit-turned-recluse like me, it was a big moment. To consider taking all 5 kids out to lunch and… TO THE PARK… well, lets just say, the excitement was darn near brain-shattering. And clearly I would not try this alone. But, with Grandma in tow, I thought I had a fighting chance. Plus, she was buying.
When the sun comes out in the Seattle area it matters little what the actual TEMPERATURE is. The thermometer can read 33 degrees, but if it is SUNNY we walk outside with sunglasses and coats slung over our arms. I have seen bikinis in 50-degree weather because of the brilliant sun (I do not don a bikini even in 90 degree weather, FYI). And when the actual temperature climbs past the magical marker of 60 degrees, the whole city goes WILD.
Saturday was one of those days.
First stop: KIDD VALLEY for some perfect hamburgers.
If you have never had a KIDD VALLEY hamburger, get thee to an airport and fly thee to Seattle. It is worth it. Warning, you will have to set your feminist sensibilites aside.
Never been a big fan of putting a scantily clad girl atop a piece of meat…. but, when said piece of meat is a KIDD VALLEY hamburger. I am willing to overlook it. So are my kids. In fact, I just might put one of my kids on top of that hamburger if it meant getting one for free (that’s a free hamburger, not a free kid… which doesn’t exist).
Lily eating delicious hamburger!
Of course we brought kid #5 along and she got to eat her very first french fry… ah, she makes me so proud.
Emme and her First French Fry
Second Stop: Houghton Beach Park
Is this just not the MOST glorious place to put a park!?!??! That’s Lake Washington in the background. Oh, and ya see those big heavy winter coats that Izzy and Lily are wearing? … yeah, those are about to come off… in a hurry!
Kids at Houghton
Lily and Ty at Houghton
I think I am a Pacific Northwest SNOB, because this is the best place to live…ever… I think I am gonna have to buy Lily some new jeans,though,… her legs are getting so dang long!
Walking along the dock
Even Emme got in on the action and had fun people watching from the safety of her stroller.
Emme People Watching
All in all, a DARN good day. Way better than crying in the bathroom and praying that your husband will come home an hour early.
And, in true northwest style, the rain was back on Sunday. And then Grandma Bloo went back home. And Emme didn’t nap. And with two hours to go until hubbie came home, I started counting the seconds. And pricing pizza for dinner.
The next swim meet? In three weeks.
Look, Santa at our house – in the technical sense – is a combination of Amazon.com, Costco, and Target. I know he is not real real. But in the bigger sense, the sense of the magical… I completely believe that he is for real.
Too often I think that we adults try to squash the imaginative life of our children (and ourselves, for that matter) – perhaps we see Santa as un-Christian, or too commercial. But I see him as magical, as someone who embodies hope and fun and whimsy. A figure who lets us be playful and childlike and forget about the “rules” for a few weeks.
I will not fall victim to the people out there who think believing in Santa takes away from the birth of Christ, or that he is creepy, or that Santa is fake. To me, and to my kids, he will always be real. And kids get this. I promise you. My 13 year old just asked me if Santa was real. I answered with, “Well, if you mean some weird guy that comes down our chimney and delivers presents, then, well, no. But, I still think he is real and I believe in him.” She nodded knowingly. See, kids know how to use their hearts and their spirits and their imaginations to hold on to the unknown. I love Santa because he lets me do that, too. Just for bit. Long enough to eat the cookies and drink the beer we have left out for him.
Those of us walking around calling ourselves mothers could easily be mistaken for lunatics. Seriously, the guilt alone from forgetting to drop Lily off at piano lessons or not nursing Ty until he could drive, is enough to weigh down a small burro. But then you start to add the real maniacal moments like when I first found my husband carrying my baby boy in a Baby Bjorn and doing the dishes at the same time. I mean, holy crap, that would send anyone over the edge, right? Isn’t it obvious that this multi-tasking in the male gender is to be treated with suspicion at least and horror at most – well, as a mother, I chose horror. What if my son fell out? What if he was emotional damaged from being reduced to assistant kitchen scullery maid? What if my husband got it in his mind that he could replace me and I was unneeded in the family (I mean, afterall, he was tending the child and doing the dishes) Like I said, lunatic.
As for Liar, that is a bit more complicated. I think we moms and wives actually lie a lot. And let’s face it, telling the truth can be really overrated. It did not work to my advantage when, after seeing the movie Troy, my husband asked me if he looked like Brad Pitt (I kid you not) and I, well, told the truth. “Not even close, honey… not even close.” The look of utter disbelief and betrayal on his face snapped me right our of my truth-telling high and I quickly countered with, “But I am sure by the time you are 40, you’ll be a spitting image of the god Achilles, uhem, I mean Brad Pitt.” Remarkably, this little gem seemed to work. I cannot remember the last time I told the truth about one of the worksheets containing triangles, squares, and circles with chicken-scratched pencil marks along the photocopied edges that my kids bring home from school to show me. I say, “Wow, good job, you are amazing!” And my kids do do a good job and they are amazing, but this is hardly represented by a worksheet. But, isn’t it my duty to pretend it is? I don’t think Lily would ever quite recover if she came home to show me her schoolwork and I said, “Explain to me the pedagogical objective that your teacher accomplished by giving you this work and which of the state’s learning requirements does this meet?” Or, even better yet, really get them thinking with, “What did you learn about yourself by doing this busy work?” I am guessing that going with the “WOW, Good Job” is better suited for the psyche of a 10 year old little girl.
The more powerful lies are the ones we moms tell ourselves. We tell ourselves that we can do it all, that we can do it alone, and that the endless hours of taking care of everyone else won’t really take its toll on us. We tell ourselves that the burnt toast tastes as good as the yummy golden brown one we just sacrificed for our first born. We claim that we don’t mind that we turned in our sporty red BMW for a mini-van and that our children don’t really define who we are. We lie about how much we need our husbands to understand us and our girlfriends to validate our choices. And we lie to ourselves that we will ever ever be able to have a flat stomach again — because the truth about that one is just too much to take.
But the truth is this. That when we become mothers we are transformed. The old passes away and we are a new creation. We understand viscerally the meaning of sacrificial and unconditional love. And in this state I think we would willingly forfeit our lives so that our children can live richer fuller ones than we ever had. A lunatic? A liar? Nah, just a good mom.
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