Zoe's New Sibling

There's just something about little girls....

When we found out I was pregnant with Zoe, we just expected a boy. After all, that seems to be what the men in Brian's family produce. His brother has four boys, and going back in his family tree, there are many more boys on the men's side than girls. So, I quietly dreamed of having a girl, but accepted the likely fact that we too would birth male offspring. I was so excited when we found out Zoe was a girl. I didn't think a whole lot about the what the next one would be. Quite frankly, I couldn't fathom having another one after going through it once. And I'm not just talking about the experience of giving birth and the unfortunate event of having my abdomen sliced open...and the experience of being deadened to all movement and feeling from the waist down, which included the horrid freaky aspect of realizing no matter how hard I told my brain to make my legs move, they would not. At least not for a few hours. Until this particular experience, the worst medical procedure I had experienced was several years previous when a doctor sliced the toenal in half on my big toe and attempted to cut one side of it out of the adjoining flesh. Unfortunately that toenail grew back in as before and has been chronically ingrown ever since. It has now been more than seven years since that terrible procedure, and I have not been able to return to a doctor to request that it be fixed again. Yet here I find myself, about to repeat an even worse experience with the whole giving birth process. Granted, I hope that a repeat C-section is not going to be required. Nevertheless, in spite of having not experienced the other method of giving birth, I don't expect it will be a whole lot more enjoyable.

So why am I going through this again? The answer can be found in this post from several months ago. Every once in awhile I have to regain that perspective and climb back into that mindset. Especially during moments that my daughter, darling though she may be, is whining and pitching fits and clinging to me like velcro every minute of any particular given day. There's a bright side and a dark side to everything. Someone once said that without the darkness, one would be incapable of experiencing the bright side--or something to that effect.

As Zoe has grown and is now approaching her second birthday, she is more fun than she's ever been. When we are leaving the house to go somewhere, she must don one of her stylish hats and grab one of her own purses, and sometimes include her pink sunglasses. Then she jubilantly exclaims, "Let's go!" and off she goes down the driveway towards the car. Those moments make my heart melt, and I never want them to end. I think to myself that it can never get any better than to be the Mommy of a little girl.

We learned yesterday that God is giving us a little boy this time. I can't seem to wrap my mind around that one. Yet I remembered this morning that at about this stage in my pregnancy with Zoe, I told my doctor that I couldn't fathom the concept loving my own child as much as I love my 18 year old cat (who was a mere 16 years old at that point). A couple years later, I still love my 18 year old cat, but I laugh at myself for wondering if I could love my own child as much. The love I have for my daughter and the bond I have with her puts my love for the old cat to shame (sorry, old man!). There is just no comparison. And so I have to believe, in spite of my infatuation with my precious little girl and her hats and purses and being unable to imagine being a mommy to a little boy, that I will laugh at myself again in a year or two when I reflect on the depth of my love for him and how I wondered if I could ever love a little boy the way I love my little girl. I think being a parent is just like that--you cannot fathom the concept until you are in the midst of it.