…where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

Go:

Dear Sugarplum, she is the last. The tiniest and most intentional of our dear ones. We didn’t know if or when she would come. We thought maybe our Quail would fill that role of baby in our heart and homes. I made peace with this. I ruminated while putting on socks and shoes and changing diapers over the pros and cons of adding on and into our already bursting to full days. And then the pressure let up. No more pumping, no more nursing, no more daily illness and breathing treatments. She walked. She started to talk. The sisters they played together the best of friends- their giggles and tumbles heard throughout their days. Where once they held hands while nursing, they now moved on to holding hands through playground fences and our days filled a regular but routine pattern. And it felt manageable. Ordinary even.

Then one day at an appointment where we opened our calendars to write in a date and time for open heart surgery; instead, the good word that there would be no surgery in our Quail’s future came as a gift from above. No opening of her heart.  That small fact alone opened our own, the trickle and twinkle of a thought that well, just maybe we could welcome one more into our lives. And so we did, that month we made the decision to have another. And 10 months later she came. Her birth, her pregnancy the easiest and yet most traumatic of them all. The room it filled with misunderstanding as I pushed and contracted. Somewhere in the trail of paperwork a note was sent that we were welcoming a second child that would also have Down syndrome like our Quail. Suddenly my world shifted through pain and pushes and dropping blood pressures. I knew this wasn’t the case but in the middle of all of this it was hard to know what was true and what might come. I labored on with insistence to these nurses that filled the small space of this birth. I knew who my children were despite what they read on a chart. My dear doctor, she came in and as we pressed on into the last bit of delivery she stopped me and made us wait. The cord it was tight. Coiled around this dear girl of ours. She pushed back against my pushes and rearranged this young life so that she could take her own deep breaths. That moment when I expected her wail to spread out between us came and passed. Silence instead. Just as piercing that empty sound was. We waited with baited breath for her own first one- and then, after the questions hung between us she wailed and I cried. She was going to be fine.

At last.

Our last.

Our Ordinary After.

Stop.