Say Hey, I Love You.

Sitting at dinner tonight, Oliver reached out and smoothed my hair. In that moment, it dawned on me, we are teaching our children not only how to live, but how to love. The way we love our children is the way they will love others, the way they will love their children. I've noticed recently, Oliver, little copy-cat that he is, copying the way I comfort him. If I mention that I don't feel well, he will come over with the sweetest look on his face and start scratching my back, smoothing my hair, patting my face and saying, "Everything will be alright, Mommy. I always make you feel better." And it's true, he always does.
What is so profound is that this child, who is only 41 months old, can register my love and reciprocate. And it makes my heart burst to know that the little things I do for him, like absentmindedly scratching his back as we watch Alvin and the Chipmunks for the umpteenth time, is expressing my love in a way he understands. I make him feel better. And one day he will grow up (sniff) and love his children and partner in the same way. It's just another little way that the love we have for our children makes us immortal. The love we teach will live on, will comfort children of future generations, will make my great-grand-children know that everything, will indeed, be alright.

The Second Time Around

The second time around isn't as bad as the first. We have more children in the family so I am no longer the sitting duck, all eyes on my ballooning stomach. My parents don't call everyday or even every other day with a, 'how are you feeling?'. I forget sometimes that I'm pregnant until I feel a kick or am so tired at the end of the night I can do nothing more than find the bed before sleep. For the most part, I am incredibly happy. I won't dread being pregnant again (yes, I said again), because other than about 5 or 6 bad weeks (as opposed to last times 40)--I've felt like a normal, happy, person. I've felt like myself. And it's probably because of this guy:

Oh, who am I kidding? It's because of these guys:

The only looming cloud of darkness is my house, which I sometimes wish would just burn up while we're at the park or something, so I could just start over. Yes, very heartless thing to wish when so many homes do  burn up. Don't blame me, blame the parasite in my womb filling my head with crazy thoughts. Anyway, the only way one thing will get done is if a hundred other things get done, and at the end of a very long day after work, after picking up Oliver, after dinner (usually cooked by Anth: Thanks, Sweets) with Oliver following behind me "helping" by lining up his freezy-pops on the floor, declaring they won't melt and renaming them stop-lights (damn you, Curious George!), you can see how it's hard for me to get anything done.

(He was so adamant they wouldn't melt that I refused to put them in the freezer. I had to show him I was right. Because they are package in plastic, he still wasn't convinced they melted even though the floor was COVERED in the melted condensation. Oh well, it's what I get for trying to be a know-it-all with a three-year-old.)
I spend my evenings hardly putting a dent in the To-Do mountain and I'm trying not to let it get me down. I have an incredible family and network of friends-who-are-family who are always offering to come over and help. But we are filthy creatures, even before we had a twister-of-curious-destruction stepping on our heels, and I am simply too embarrassed to let anyone pass our doors.

All you Mom's out there (I'm giving a major shout-out to my Sis-in-Law Britt), I don't know how you do it!

That's probably the only thing the same in the second time around--the constant stress of a dirty house, dwindling months and a list of to-do's that grows longer by the day. But compared to my last pregnancy, the dark, dreadful, depressing 9 months of Oliver's inhabitants in my womb, I'll take a dirty and messy house, gladly, and without (much) complaint.

Twenty-One Weeks, carrying high and happy.