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Friday, November 14, 2014

Telling Rachel

It was the night of November 2nd and all through the house
Only two creatures were stirring—me and my spouse.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds
Trying to sleep, counting sheep in their heads...

But not all of the children were asleep yet, of course, because my children are notoriously bad at sleeping. I had been working on our Christmas newsletter for this year, which is in poem format, as usual, when I felt the need for a potty break (something I feel the need for quite frequently nowadays). I had been working on a couplet announcing this coming babe and just left my draft sitting on my screen when I went to the bathroom—because the kids were in bed, so...

When I came out of the bathroom, Rachel was staring at the computer with her mouth hanging open.

"Is it true?" she asked.

"Is what true?" I asked.

She pointed at my screen.

"What?" I asked again.

"Are you really having a baby next year?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

And her mouth fell open again. She looked really excited.


“That’s why I’ve been so sick and tired. Babies make Mommies feel sick and tired.”

She patted my tummy.

“But it’s not even here yet,” she pointed out.

And yet, I still feel sick and tired.

“Where’s it going to sleep?” she asked as I walked her back to her room.

“I have no idea,” I said. “We’ll figure that out later. You need to get to bed.”

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked.

"We won't know for a while yet," I said.

"I hope it's a boy," she said.

This is something I wrote last week, on November 7th:

We asked Rachel to not say anything about the baby. So she hasn’t. Technically.

What she has been doing is coming up to rub my barely-there belly quite frequently. She will randomly ask, “When are you going to HAVE it?” and at dinner she asked a question about the “Y-B-A-B.” We can’t spell things forward because Miriam is too quick on the draw for that.

So far I don’t think anyone else has caught on, but it’s only a matter of time before they do. The reason we didn’t want to tell the kids so early was because children can be incredibly impatient and I didn’t want to spend the next 30 weeks of my life explaining that the baby STILL isn’t due yet. Technically, I suppose the odds of going to my due date are pretty low. We’re hoping to make it through at least part of May though!).

Rachel's also taken to calling the baby Dobby, as in: "It'll be nice to have another Dobby around the house. Get it. Dobby. It sounds like baby, but it's not. It's just Dobby. The new Dobby will be a bat baby, just like me and Ben. Bats are usually born in June or July."

The other night she was wondering aloud very meaningfully, "I wonder what it would be like if our family had six people in it."

"Our family only has five people in it," Miriam said.

"I know," Rachel said. "But imagine if it had six people. What would that be like?"

"Is Grandma coming to live with us?!" Miriam asked.

"No," Rachel said.

"Auntie Josie, then?"

"No," Rachel said. "I'm just imagining what it would be like to have six people in our family. Like, what if there were four children instead of three..."

"There are three children," Miriam said.

"But imagine if there were four," Rachel said.

Rachel's also been worried about it being a preemie-born, which I suppose is a justified concern. Benjamin's birth was a stressful time for everyone.

Andrew called to make my first appointment for me because it was during fall intercession and I didn't want to make a phone call like that will all the kids in the house (because back then none of them knew and I wanted to keep it like that).

"Is this a high-risk pregnancy?" the lady on the phone asked.

"It's...medium risk," Andrew guessed.

"There's no such thing as medium risk," the lady said. "It's either high risk or not high risk. Why would you say your wife is medium risk?"

"Our last baby was premature," he said.

"That's high risk then," she said.

But, really, it feels more like medium risk. I'll be on weekly hormone injections starting the week we get back from Utah, which will hopefully help us go to term, at least (maybe even full term). The hospital we'll be delivering at, again, doesn't have a NICU but if things are looking dicey later on in the pregnancy I'll be transferred to the actual high-risk clinic (where I would have to go now if I had refused the injections) and the doctors there deliver at the hospital with a NICU.

Anyway, if all goes well this baby shouldn't be born until at least 37 weeks.

1 comment:

  1. I loved reading how Rachel found out, and about her Dobby talk. Ha! Your kids are so cute!

    ReplyDelete