Over the Rainbow

Things have obviously been busy around here for the last two months-- two happy months that have flown by in a haze of activity and visitors and laundry and too little sleep. But this week Ellie is spending her mornings in a camp and our last visitor of the summer has returned home safely, and most of the laundry is put away. I am "trapped" under a sleeping baby (do not send help) so I figured while I have an actual opportunity to sit down for a bit, I would get a bit of writing done.

Our little girl Penelope June (known around here as Poppy) arrived, as scheduled, safely via c-section on June 1. I won't bore or disgust anyone with the details (childbirth is gross, guys!) but every birth is emotional, and this one more so than most. We were fortunate to have a team of experienced doctors, nurses, and midwives taking care of us in the OR that day. The nurse and midwife who sat with me for an entire day as I labored with Sam and then helped me bring him into the world were able to be there when Poppy joined our family, too-- I felt so fortunate to have them there not only for my own comfort, but also because I understand just how much healing a healthy baby can bring to a broken heart-- I felt that they deserved the bookend on that experience every bit as much as I did. Obviously Mike was also there, and got to hold and keep an eye on Poppy while they weighed her and measured her and did whatever else they do when the baby emerges.

Poppy has settled right in with our family. Ellie loves having a little sister, and sweetly offers to sing songs or share toys when Poppy is crying. (Also, Ellie is a really big fan of all the new toys and stuffed animals that she can "borrow" from Poppy.) She likes to help Poppy with tummy time and insists Poppy join in for bedtime stories every night, even when there are nights when Ellie could have her parents to herself for a little bit. Poppy, for her part, has started offering her baby smiles to Ellie occasionally, though I'm still her favorite person to smile at, since when she gets passed to me she knows that milk is coming. She sleeps alright for now, (Ellie did too at this age, so I'm not ready to automatically assume that Poppy is going to be our good sleeper.) She eats well-- her double chin and chunky little baby thighs are some solid evidence that she's growing at a good rate. She's pooping great, since we're doing diaper laundry every couple of days-- so she's three for three on her little baby responsibilities of eating, sleeping, and pooping. She is everything we could have asked for in a baby. We all love her more than words can say. She's SO cute.

Since Poppy's birth we have been able to breathe in a way that we couldn't for months, finally exhaling all the anxiety that we'd been holding in ourselves. True joy has crept back into our home-- the sweet innocence of an adorable baby has a way of doing that. But having our rainbow baby at home with us still has its own brand of heartbreak. Everything we do is a potent reminder of the things we should have been doing a year ago with Sam. Every middle of the night feeding is another opportunity to contemplate what it would have been like had we done it with him instead. The concreteness of Poppy's presence is another contrast to Sam's absence-- with him we could only wonder how his babyhood would have been. With Poppy, we get to experience it. I imagine as she grows older this will diminish. She'll outgrow the new baby stage and differentiate herself as an individual. We'll see more of her personality begin to shine and it will be harder to think of her as "the new baby" and easier to think of her as Poppy, our daughter who skipped crawling/hates peas/prefers bears to elephants/whatever she does that is unique to her.

One night a couple of weeks ago, Ellie threw up in our bed. She didn't have a fever and it was just a one-off incident, probably from too much excitement and cookie dough before bed. But it was in our sheets and in her hair, so it necessitated a middle of the night bedding change, laundry load, and bath. As I was filling the tub and trying to calm her down while also trying not to barf myself (the smell gets me every time), I was instantly transported to a night last May. It was the first night after Sam died that we had our house to ourselves. The funeral was done, family had gone home, and the house suddenly felt so big, the three of us huddled in one bed in one room in one corner of the otherwise empty house. Ellie threw up in our bed that night too, (she has her own bed to sleep and puke in of course, but she seems to prefer ours) and we had to change the sheets and do a 2AM bath. That night, last May, as I shampooed chunks out of my daughter's hair, I thought to myself, "if there was ever a time when two crying babies seemed preferable to one, this is that time." In my loneliness and grief, I was aware of how much more overwhelmed I would have felt if Sam had lived and we had had to do a middle of the night bath and a middle of the night feeding at the same time, but I also still knew that situation would be vastly preferable to my reality.

So this time, when Ellie threw up in the middle of the night, I wasn't terribly overwhelmed. I did the bath, Mike did the sheets, the newborn slept through the whole thing in a fortuitous accident of good timing. As I shampooed Ellie I thought about how any minute now I'd hear Poppy begin crying and merely felt grateful. We've had just the right amount of chaos in our home since Poppy arrived. I can nurse her while Ellie runs around the house. I can wipe two butts in the same five minutes. I can do any of it and rarely lose my cool, because two screaming kids at once is infinitely preferable to the silence that followed Sam's birth-- a silence that seeped in to each and every crack and crevice of our lives, focusing us inward. A silence like blinders, shutting out so much of the world that didn't occur right under our noses. With Poppy's arrival, the silence has receded.

The other night, Ellie asked to look at our pictures of Sam. She hasn't asked to do that since Poppy was born, so I obliged, even though I suspected this might be a bedtime stalling tactic. As we flipped through the images, I noticed something-- Sam and Poppy have the same ears. I liked that-- it's like another little bit of him is here with us. All of our babies have looked remarkably alike. Sometimes when I see Poppy, I feel like I'm having some Ellie deja vu-- they have such similar faces. And when I first laid eyes on Sam, I thought he looked quite a bit like Ellie as well. So knowing that Poppy brought Sam's ears here with her-- that feels like another little piece of him that I get to mentally collect for myself. Maybe it's so that as she grows and I tell her about her brother and how much we love him, and miss him, and are grateful to him for sending her to us; he'll be able to hear it too.