Playing Peek-a-Boo From the Trenches

When I was a first time mommy, I can remember friends asking me, "How is it?" "How's it going?" I was one of the first of my close friends to get married and start a family. My response was always a positive, "Great! It's amazing!" not because I was trying to prove to everyone that I had it all together, but because I was genuinely oblivious of the hardships of motherhood. You do what you have to do and the rewards far exceed the difficulties. Money, finances, paying the bills, owning a home...oh. my. GOSH, home ownership! No body warns you about how difficult that is, and what's the reward? A roof over your heads? Just like you had before when you were renting? Yeah. Swell. But these are the difficult things. These are the things I stressed over, but motherhood? I was born to be a mother. It felt like the easiest, most natural thing ever. So, maybe I wasn't the best person to ask if you were looking a less biased response.

Fast forward to 2015 and 4 kids later. It's not so easy. The rewards are still immeasurable, but the difficulties...well, a little harder to overlook.

Every additional child somehow makes for double the laundry, so my laundry responsibilities have doubled FOUR times in the last 8 years. Each additional child means less time for cleaning but double the mess, more phone calls and appointments to make and less time to make them, more noise, less quiet. And each child comes with their own set of rules. This one can't be put on his belly or he'll scream til he pukes. This one needs to stay upright for 30 minutes after eating, or she pukes. This one won't drink day old breast milk...or he pukes. All the rules somehow involve puking.

Now I have four. I'm homeschooling two and trying to coax the third into sitting just long enough to color half a page. All the while trying to keep the fourth from...you guessed it...puking.

She is not going to be a basketball player, I'm certain. She couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with that puke. I need an adult sized bib to cover my chest and shoulders while burping her. As it is, I will use a large receiving blanket, because burp cloths are tiny and useless, and she will lean and scrape and crawl until she has the blanket pulled out of her way and a clear shot to vomit down between my boobs. On second thought, maybe she will be a baller, a scrappy one, and she likes a challenge.

And oddly enough, her "I'm gonna puke!" screaming and clawing is strangely similar to her "I need to eat!" screaming and clawing. Imagine an adult running around, frantically searching the cupboards for food right before puking. That's what life is like with her right now. And what's a mom to do when her new baby is clawing and scraping and rooting around for what I can only assume is sustenance? I feed her, and get rewarded with double the puke.

I could free up a lot of time in my days if she could keep her food down. Truth. 

So, it's harder to overlook all of that from the trenches, where I am outnumbered, trying not to get taken out by projectiles, and trying to keep everyone else calm. The days go by faster and slower all at the same time...like these never-ending days which somehow pass me by weeks and months at a time.

But then there's a slow, quiet lull, a moment for me to peak up over the trench, somewhat skeptical of my safety, and find my toddler lovingly wiping the spit up from the babies mouth while my two oldest read to her and bounce her in her chair. And I am reminded that the rewards still far exceed the difficulties, no matter how much laundry cleaning puke is thrown at me, because each additional child means double the love, so the love in my home has doubled FOUR times in the last 8 years. ;-)

From Charlotte to Charlotte: the Birth of a New Chapter

In the words of my husband, in his best mockery of LeBron James ever, "We have four kids; not one, not two, not three, BUT FOUR kids!"


You see, this was the dream. When we began dating and discussing the things we wanted in life, we both knew that we wanted four children. However, our opinions on that changed after the third. I do not enjoy pregnancy, my body rebels against me during it. In fact, labor and delivery is easier on me than the actual pregnancy. And my babies aren't little, y'all!


So after our third child, we took a hard look at our family and tried to decide if we were ok with this. I was unsure. We seemed incomplete, but at the same time, I really didn't want to go through all of that again. I had been looking forward to getting back into shape, and playing some basketball again. Then, last spring, my sweet daughter cried to me about how much she wanted a little sister. We couldn't guarantee her one, of course, but as a gal with sisters of my own, it broke my heart that we may not even try to give that gift to our own daughter. My response to her, "Pray about it." After all, that's pretty much where her daddy and I were in the thought process ourselves.


Just a few months later, SURPRISE! We were actually visiting my sister in North Carolina when I had a sneaking suspicion that I could possibly be pregnant. Sure enough, it was confirmed just a couple weeks later. I will admit, I was a little concerned as to how my daughter would react if we found out we were having another boy, but she calmed my nerves just a couple of weeks before that ultrasound, "Mommy, I really want a sister, but I will love him if it's a brother too." Melt my heart!


Then, if you read The Anti-Climactic Gender Reveal, you know that my daughter was actually the very first to know that she would, in fact, have a little sister. So fitting.


So this past Saturday, February 28, our little surprise, and Chastity's answer to prayer, arrived. I spent the last few weeks of the pregnancy in excruciating pain from my back to my hips, to my knees and ankles. I could barely make it up our stairs. My husband and I continually expressed our excitement that this was almost over. "Ugh, I am never doing this again!"


Then, yesterday, as we pulled away from the hospital, and my husband was still expressing how awesome it is to be done with all of that, a very strange and unexpected feeling washed over me. Suddenly my annoyed and irritated, "Ugh, I am never doing this again!" turned into a sad inner panic of, "Oh my gosh! I am never doing this again!" As we drove off, the hospital disappeared into the distance and a slow motion reel of every birthing experience I had ever had played through my mind, from my C-section with Elijah to my first, miraculous VBAC with Chastity, to the amazing and shocking VBACs of Isaac and Charlotte, my 9lb 11 oz and 10 lb babies (ok, she was 9lbs 15.8 ounces, but give me that 10).


I don't want to be pregnant again. It probably wouldn't even be wise, knowing all the problems I just had with my body. However, knowing that a door is closed on that chapter of our lives we only dreamed about just a short time ago, brings waves of emotions and uncontrollable rolling tears to this face of a woman who just birthed a 10 lb baby without crying. Seriously.


Exactly 8 years ago, we were beside ourselves with joy in the very early stages of our first pregnancy. It was all new and exciting. We could still hardly believe we were married, let alone increasing in numbers! We were living in a small apartment in Charlotte, NC, when this exciting journey began, and our family took it's first steps. Now, our own little (big) Charlotte Hope, completes that journey, ending that chapter of our lives, and beginning a new one.


As I watch my husband play with the kids in the living room, while Charlotte sleeps peacefully in her chair, I know that this sadness for a time now gone may never fully go away, but I can comfort myself in knowing that she is not so much the end of a chapter, but rather, the beginning of a new one.