A year ago today, we welcomed a silly, sweet boy with a chill disposition into our family.
When I started looking at photos, I was overwhelmed by the love we all feel for our rainbow baby. 
During this difficult year, Seven has been a ray of sunshine in the dark night. 
He isn’t interested in following anyone else’s program, but he is content to make his own way without creating a lot of waves. 
As the past few weeks have gone by and he’s sprouted teeth and started to stand on his own, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what’s to come – when we have to say goodbye to our baby and hello to a little toddler. 
I know that no matter how big he gets, he will still be everyone’s Little Brother and my baby. 
He’s got so many people to watch over him, defend him, and tell him what to do. 
Hopefully that won’t put a cramp in his style.
Something tells me it won’t.
This is me at the end of the day, a hot mess, hanging on for dear life. Or, alternately, a sloth at the Bronx Zoo. Your choice.
For years now, I have wanted to stop using screens in the evening, at least some of the time. I’ve always been a little jealous of married friends who casually say, “Oh, we don’t really watch TV together.”
But it is our default, after we get the kids to bed. We flop on the sofa in the living room, after both of us have worked hard all day. Then, we turn on the TV and watch something together. We’ve struggled to choose something to watch, even more so lately. A lot of the stuff the Chaplain would normally pick is just too cerebral for me to try to follow after I’m brain dead (NOVA, for instance? Fascinating, but I’m just too burnt to follow it.) The things I would choose are too girly (PBS’s new version of Little Women, for instance. Ah-mazing. But probably not of interest to the Chaplain).
So we were stuck in this rut where we would watch something we both were kind of ok with, but neither of us loved it. And I would trudge up to bed afterward feeling like I had wasted an hour (or two).
Last night, three of our kids had dress rehearsals for their upcoming dance recital. If you told me as a young person or even as a young mom that I would be a Dance Mom one day, I likely would have scoffed at you. Yet watching my kids perform last night in their costumes gave me an unaccountable sense of pride. There were many wins yesterday afternoon. Everyone who needed hair, makeup, and tights without holes got them. We managed, against all odds, to make it to the studio on time, everyone in their appropriate costumes.
The Chaplain met us there, and we tag-teamed the little kids. I took scads of pictures that turned out terrible, as I knew they would, due to the dark purple walls of the studio and the unforgiving fluorescent lights. I had used both my camera and my phone so hard that by the end of the practice performances, the batteries for both were limping along and close to death. I thought we were finished, and the Chaplain and I started loading the Littles into the car.
If you have kids, how often do you bathe them? It depends a lot on their age, right?
Middle age kids tend to be a little stinkier, but need reminding to bathe regularly and put on deodorant if they wear it. With a little nudge, it’s easy for them to take care of things themselves… with prompting to turn on the bathroom fan, and a knock to remind them not to spend 30 minutes in there.
Babies don’t get baths unless you bathe them, but they also get a lot of “in between” washing of faces, hands, and backsides, and sometimes the parts that are attached to those parts when the mess creeps up and around. With them, bath time is almost 100% hands-on for the grown up.
Toddlers, preschoolers, and lower elementary kids are the ones who are most likely to have actual dirt on them, and they need varying levels of supervision in the tub, and help getting clean. We’re supervising a toddler to make sure they don’t drown, but the primary reason you’re keeping a close eye on the 4-6-year-old crowd is to make sure they don’t flood your bathroom and cause your tub to fall through the floor.
Last night, about an hour before bedtime, Six quietly told the Chaplain he didn’t feel good, and curled up on the sofa. A few minutes later, he was asleep.
An hour later, as we were putting everyone to bed, the Chaplain lifted Six off the sofa to transfer him to his bed. He found Six was burning with a fever a shade under 104. We feared he wouldn’t go back to bed, but after a dose of children’s acetaminophen, he snuggled willingly into bed and went back to sleep.
Three hours later, the Chaplain and I were reading in bed when I heard a cry coming from the room Six shares with his older sisters. I paused to make sure I had heard him. There it was again. As I walked into the room, Two made a dramatic pronouncement along the lines of, “If he does that all night, I’m going to die.”
