Welcome to our family, Doogleberry.

Dearest Son,

You are freshly bathed and smell of lavender and milky baby breath, and I am watching you sleep beside me on the couch, swaddled in the softest blanket and dreaming whatever new babies dream. Your little chest rises and falls softly, interrupted by the little hiccups and chirps of a little one still unfamiliar with life on the outside.

I love you.

And I don’t want to forget these little moments, sandwiched as they are between the constant hum of family chaos—Mama and Daddy referee sibling scuffles and orchestrate the frantic rush of dinner time, bath time, tooth brushing, and pajamas while adjusting to a new little person in our family. It’s the happiest kind of circus, but the days run together and smoosh together in an indistinguishable blur. I look at the clock at night and cannot believe the day is gone with so little accomplished.

But then, I snuggled you most of the day, and that’s something.

You are the perfect addition to our little family. You have a little nose and chin that look just like your brother and sister did when they were born, and a dusting of soft blonde hair all over your head. You make all kinds of little grunting and snorting noises when you are awake, and the sweetest sighs and soft hiccups while you sleep. You love eating and sleeping and hate to be bathed and you sound like a lamb when you are happy and a lion when you are mad. You are perfect. You are a dream.

And so I’ll write it all down—even though I missed a chunk of time on this little blog—so that I can remember what it was like to juggle my three babies when they were small and we lived in a borrowed space and nothing was the same as it was 10 months ago before we found out you were coming, before we sold our house and moved, before job changes and preschool and all kinds of other little life changes flipped our routine upside down.

***

I did a lot of reading and thinking ahead of time about what your birthday might look like. I didn’t have any real agenda other than doing my very best to leave the hospital with a healthy baby in my arms. Working in the field that I do has long-since scarred me with the knowledge that there are no guarantees in this world, that scary, hard things happen every single day to people who look a lot like me, and that real life very rarely shakes out exactly the way we plan it. All I really wanted from the experience was to get you out of the deal.

But I’ll admit it, around 3 days after your due date had come and gone without even the slightest hint of baby-action, I was getting a little restless. My mom had been in the hospital, my Bandie had died, and your Daddy had made an extremely rare and therefore unnerving trip to InstaCare all in the days after you were theoretically supposed to be here, and guess what! Still no baby. 

So I ate an entire pineapple with the dimmest hope that the crazies on the Internet were right and it would put me into labor. (Hint: nope.) I lumbered awkwardly on the elliptical and took long, painful walks (waddles?) up and down the hills near Nana and PopPop’s house.

And still, no baby.

 And so, even though I had sort of hoped to avoid any unnecessary intervention, my doctor and your daddy and I decided it was probably best to give the whole process a bit of a jump start.

Spoiler alert: turns out you were worth the wait.

To be continued...