Party of Five

Our third child — a boy — was born on Wednesday, June 12.

He weighed in at eight pounds even, my smallest baby.

So between his smaller size and this being my third delivery, this should have been a breeze.

Right?

Wrong.

I’ll spare you all the details, but apparently delivering a baby who is face-up makes for a more difficult birth. So, when it was over, I was pretty pleased to see that my two legs are still attached to my torso. Somehow. And, more importantly, everyone is happy and healthy.

The face-up business was a last-minute surprise in a string of acrobatic stunts this child has been pulling for a while now. In the last few weeks of my pregnancy, this baby went from breech position to head-down four separate times. So anything was possible.

But, looking at his face now, I have to believe that all of his in-utero tricks are now out of his system and he will be nothing but sweet from this moment forward.

{Sometimes sleep deprivation makes people say delirious things. That, and the intoxicating newborn baby smell. How has someone not bottled this stuff yet?}

And I’m happy to report that naming our sweet boy only took three hours after his arrival. We had what my husband calls a “short list” going in, if you consider 5-7 entries to be short. I should also mention that, in the delivery room, he was online looking at baby name sites. You know, just a little diversion in between my contractions.

But yes, our son has a name. You’ll have to take my word for it since I’m one of those people who doesn’t put her kids’ names on the blog. I’m probably already facing potential litigation from them once they are old enough to read my posts, so this way I can say, “None of this is about you. Do you see your names anywhere? This is all fiction, my love. Fiction based oh-so-loosely on that time you did something kind of just like that. But you were wearing a blue shirt, not a green one.”

As for my older two kids, let me describe their reaction to this life-changing event as a case of mixed reviews. I won’t point fingers, but I think this picture really sums things up best.

So we’re all finding our way. Our older two are learning that it can, in fact, take even longer to get us out of the house than it did before. My husband and I are figuring out how to distribute our attention while not showing the abject fear of now being outnumbered by children. We will get there.

In the meantime, I have to slowly reintroduce wine and caffeine back into my life. And I have to find a post-partum swim burqa to wear at the town pool this summer.

But more than anything, I will remember how blessed I am. And I will take it all in. The crazy days and nights of a newborn {mostly nights}. The way he curls his limbs up tight to his body and squeaks for attention and rests flat on my shoulder in a blissed-out, post-milk state. Because he will only be this small for a short, short while.