I still use the Internet lots (Twitter, Instagram, some Facebook) but this space has been sitting quiet for a long time and when I think about it, I just… don’t know what to think. Telling my stories in this medium was my original step into the online world and it is also the one that ultimately feels the most natural to me. But on the other hand I haven’t actually been doing it for so long, so is it really that natural? Do I even need it or want it any more?
Ugh, sorry, I know this type of hideously self-indulgent navel-gazing helps no one. It’s just hard to get started without it, after almost a year of silence.
Anyway, I’m back because this blog contains stories of all my children, or did until now, and I can’t let it go without the story of the newest one.
We learned that he was on the way last November (very early on the morning of the 8th, to be exact - I wouldn’t suggest waking up and taking your temperature and then telling your husband you might be pregnant at 5:00 in the morning unless you want him to actually go to the store and get you a pregnancy test right then because ain’t no one sleeping with that hanging over your heads) (now that I think of it, I guess I told him because I did want him to go get the test… but I felt dumb for not just rolling over and going back to sleep instead of reaching for the stupid thermometer. The whole thing would’ve been just as meaningful after the sun rose.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes so this pregnancy falls in the special category that, in my experience, many Catholic NFP users know well: not unplanned, but not achieved on purpose, more like: we had reached a point where we weren’t motivated enough to avoid pregnancy with any particular… assiduousness. Ergo: two bright lines on that 6:00 am test.
Of course the delightful thing about a baby is that he (spoiler alert!) is a person, an end in himself, and therefore becomes totally worth the trouble by the fact of his very existence. Even if it doesn’t feel like that immediately (pregnancy nausea can die in a fire, as can “irritable uterus;” this was unfortunately not an easy pregnancy) it is objectively true and feels immediately true and truer once I’m face to face with him.
People who’ve been reading my blog since the beginning or near the beginning *waves at all three of you* have commented to me that it’s notable that I started this blog because of our failed attempts to conceive and now here I am with so many children that I almost need two hands to count them. Believe me, I’ve noticed too. I think every summer about myself in the summer of 2005, the darkest year of my life so far, and how amazed she would be to see me now. The dawn that came after that year has been so much brighter than I imagined or hoped it could be.
And now we have added to our brood of rapidly-growing (seriously; the lengths of their legs and the sizes of their feet are starting to terrify me) big kids, a brand new tiny one:
Felix Thomas, born 12:59pm on Friday, June 24, 2016. 6 pounds, 12 ounces, 20 inches long. Blessedly healthy, close enough to term as to make no difference, came home with us. We could not be happier to have him.
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