Today
at 4:56 am, 4 years ago we welcomed our first son. I welcomed him with
medicated and 3 day labor exhaustion “welcome to THIS world”
statement which was slightly embarrassing to record as my first words
in his precious baby book. But of course, not nearly as embarrassing
as my french braided pigtails that I let my mom give me to keep my
hair back. They just topped off my 15 years old looking face.
Josh's
first response was “hey little guy” even though after watching
his first birth did not think anything about his size was little. But
he was little 6.6 pounds... Little and Old Man like. Our lives would
never be the same.
Sometimes Josh and I lay in bed discussing how
different things would have been if we would of waited a little while
to start having kids. You know waiting more than 3 months after our wedding to get pregnant. What if we would of had 2-3 years of just us time. What would we have done or not done?
Road trips wouldn't be interrupted every hour
by one of us yelling "hold it" and then receiving a count down response
that in 5,4,3,2,1 they are peeing their pants.
Vacations would be
relaxing not a “when will they nap” “when will they eat”
disaster. And we might actually sit by the beach or be in public with out the worry of someone pulling their pants down to pee
The house would stay clean longer than 2 hours
and laundry
would be completed for longer than 2 seconds.
I would have all my
cooking utensils in the kitchen not in the sandbox
and no worms would
be housed in my cups or found in random games in our house.
Saturday could be sleep in days and would not be interrupted by children already awake and snapping iPhone pics of us trying to get some rest.
But days when we do lay
there imaging all we may have missed out on. We hear our bedroom door open
and two sets of feet scurry and four little hands pull themselves up
onto our bed. Both boys snuggle into the covers with us. We even
sometimes get a “you guys are our best friends ever” from one of
them. They giggle and smile. And we know our hearts would never be
this full. Parenting is a gift and we just were anxious to open our
gifts. Curious to enter into these days. Days of worry and stress that are easily outweighed by laugher and love. And now time flies as we look back 4 years ago, but in a way we are able to freeze lots more
moments.. those moments when we both look at each other when they
come out dressed in full hockey gear
and are both making tabs in our
memory. We blink slowly as to not miss these fun times. I'll never know what shopping and camping would have been
like with out constant chaos but that's how God intended it to be for
our family. So I'll snuggle on Saturdays with our little wiggle worms
and enjoy the path our lives took and not imagine anything
different... until someone head butts my nose and my thoughts steer that way once again.
So Happy Birthday Cooper. You forever changed our lives
for the better. You make us laugh and you make us proud. You have
mommy's imagination and sensitivity and daddy's way of making people
feel important and special. We love you and are glad you pulled us
from a life of living for our own desires. You made us realize a
deeper value than our shallow wants and needs, a desire to love and
give unselfishly. I'm so thankful your sweet little cry was the one that made me a mom. As you kissed me yesterday and told me "I'm glad I'm your kid" I say "right back at ya buddy!" We love you Cooper.
