Six years ago today, I was in my hospital room, holding onto a little peanut of a baby, all while wondering if Tim had gotten the three older children to dinosaur class at the rec center. I remember thinking how easy it all was (aside from a good dose of fatigue): to push out my fourth child, to look at her sweet face, to put her to my breast, to be a mother.
It's not that mothering is easy (parenting is by far the most difficult job I've encountered). It's that Melina makes mothering easy. She's the sort of child who accepts what is thrown at her, who is happy with sloppy seconds if need be, and who loves life to the fullest and simply wants to have fun. How she has that fun, she sometimes doesn't care. Melina is also one of the most outgoing of any child that I know. She makes friends at the pool, at the grocery store, and at the bank. She pushes me to be more outgoing, to accept the challenges life hands me, and to roll with the punches. She is a course in being happy with yourself and finding the beauty within us. She's a marvel, this fourth child, in so many different ways than her siblings.
There's so much going on here today, that I don't really have the time to be sentimental. To think about the fact that Melina now needs to use two hands to say how old she is, that she will be headed to school all day come mid-August, that she will mature and grow and blossom over the next year so that by the time she's seven, she might have given up words like skabetti, and eksimo and tenically. And to be honest, I'm glad about not having time. Because I have a very good imagination, and can easily leap from thinking about a soon-to-be first grader to her first day of college (sob).
Happy Birthday, Melina!
It's not that mothering is easy (parenting is by far the most difficult job I've encountered). It's that Melina makes mothering easy. She's the sort of child who accepts what is thrown at her, who is happy with sloppy seconds if need be, and who loves life to the fullest and simply wants to have fun. How she has that fun, she sometimes doesn't care. Melina is also one of the most outgoing of any child that I know. She makes friends at the pool, at the grocery store, and at the bank. She pushes me to be more outgoing, to accept the challenges life hands me, and to roll with the punches. She is a course in being happy with yourself and finding the beauty within us. She's a marvel, this fourth child, in so many different ways than her siblings.
There's so much going on here today, that I don't really have the time to be sentimental. To think about the fact that Melina now needs to use two hands to say how old she is, that she will be headed to school all day come mid-August, that she will mature and grow and blossom over the next year so that by the time she's seven, she might have given up words like skabetti, and eksimo and tenically. And to be honest, I'm glad about not having time. Because I have a very good imagination, and can easily leap from thinking about a soon-to-be first grader to her first day of college (sob).
Happy Birthday, Melina!
Comments