Since I was a little girl,  I have always had a stash of make-up for when I really needed it. It started with a simple play set which included lipgloss, blush, and probably loads of lead. As I matured, so too did my make-up materials. I started using eye-shadow, foundation, mascara, and in time eyelash curlers and eye-liner. But really, these were only ever used for special occasions. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t really see a need for make-up. Sure, as a teenager I saw lots of reflection imperfections, but none of these were fixable with a simple sweep of a make-up brush.

I didn’t really start wearing make-up regularly until a year or two into my relationship with a big-city boy (who ended up becoming my husband). One afternoon, as I was getting ready for a shift at the coffee shop I worked at, my boyfriend made a comment. It was meant to be an innocent, contemplative comment – one that commented on the difference between the giant city he grew up in and the small-town mentality that I had. But it changed me.

“Girls never leave the house without make-up on where I am from, let alone go to work that way!”*

And there I was. Stuck in that place where I wasn’t quite sure if I had just been criticized. I didn’t know whether the man that I loved wished I was something more.

Insecure.

Of course, I wore make-up on our first date and every subsequent date after that. Sure, I wore make-up when I handed out resumes and attended job interviews. But to me, make-up was an addition, a “something special” that wasn’t always needed.

But after that comment, I grabbed my make-up bag and started applying. And, instead of resenting my boyfriend for making me feel unpretty, I started to find confidence every time I left the house. I painted that confidence on every morning and hoped it wouldn’t smudge during the day.

Underneath it all was someone who had lost her natural confidence.

Since becoming a mother, I now go through phases with make-up. Sometimes I wear it every day. Sometime just to work. Sometimes it gets applied whenever I leave the house. And sometimes, I ignore it altogether.

I brought my giant make-up bag to the hospital with me when I was in labour. I planned to be the perfectly pretty new Mama, all made-up and ready for my prime-time when the cameras started snapping.

But I didn’t touch that make-up bag. Not for months.

I was happy. In love. Busy. Overwhelmed. Exhausted. My life had completely changed.

And I wondered where the pretty girl went. Motherhood gave me so much, but it stole that one, little thing from me.

My skin has since lost its teenage pimples but the bags under my eyes have grown. I skip through profile pictures and notice a distinct difference between pre-baby and post-baby me. I look tired. Older. And typically, less made-up.

Soon, life settled down for me. My boy was older. The pounds had been shed. I was back at work. My days started with a make-up routine again and most days, I looked in the mirror feeling like I was rocking it. I was no frumpy-Mom. I was a hot-Mama!

But now, I’m back in this place. This place that finds me feeling huge, exhausted, and unpretty. My routine has changed and make-up has fallen from my priorities again. The pregnancy, early-wake ups and long days, being both a working and stay-at-home Mom is leaving my time crunched and my energy drained. I forgo my morning make-up routine for a few minutes of extra sleep and haven’t thrown on a pair of heels in weeks.

And without this mask, I am struggling to find the confidence I once had. I’m struggling to feel like the woman my husband married. I am struggling to feel like myself.

But this? This is what motherhood looks like. It is raw and exhausted and overwhelmed and busy. It is unrefined. It is natural. It is beautiful.

 *My husband rarely puts his foot in his mouth. Cut him some slack this time around. It was years ago. He is pretty darn incredible.

Previous Weeks

This morning I woke up to the sound of my alarm ringing at 4:45am, just like any other day. I took a deep breath and cringed as my blankets were pulled back and the cold air embraced my body. In the dark, I scrambled to tie up my housecoat and find some semblance of a clean outfit amongst the clothes strewn haphazardness around my bedroom. I snuck out of the bedroom as quietly as a lumbering 30-week pregnant woman can so as not to disturb my sleeping husband. Just like any other day.

Except today, the man I left in the bed beside me is my Valentine.

Today probably won’t be my favourite Valentine’s Day ever. Now that I am pregnant, there will be no bottles of wine. Now that we are parents, there will be no romantic date. Now that the transit strike has us working opposite hours, we will not only have to forgo the lunch date we planned, but I will hardly see my husband all day.

But is that really what Valentine’s Day is about? The wine? The diners out? The abundance of gifts I’m sure will be waiting for me when I get home (right? right?!)? Maybe. Maybe that is what Valentine’s Day comprises of. But that isn’t what Valentine’s Day is really about. Not at all.

Valentine’s Day can be a contentious holiday. To some, it is all that is wrong with the marketing machine and commercialism. To others, it is a painful reminder of what they don’t have. Still others see it as a loophole to acting unloving to your partner every other day of the year.

To me, it is all about loving. Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be about the money spent or the loneliness felt. And it certainly doesn’t diminish acts of love shown on other days of the year. Valentine’s Day is about seeking out those people in your life who are important to you and making sure that they feel loved. It is about giving our love, without, necessarily, expecting anything back in return. It is a reminder that love, in essence, is an act and not a passive experience.

Lately, I have not been very good at loving the person I should be loving most of all. I committed my life to a man, and instead, my life seems to have taken hold of me. My focus is always on the next task I should be accomplishing and because of that, I often don’t even see this person I am sharing my life with. Often, on my way to go do something very important, I rush right by Dan only to have him stop me and wrap his arms around me. “There.” He says, “Isn’t that nice? It is good to pretend to love your husband every once in a while.”

I am sure we have all gotten to this point in our relationships. That point where we suck at showing love. Perhaps emotions get in the way and we are too hurt or angry to focus on actively loving. Or maybe we are stuck in a cycle of selfishly desiring love instead of realizing that perhaps our spouse needs love too. For me, life gets in the way. Everything I love – my child, my passions, my desire to check things off a list – gets in the way of the one I chose to love.

So this is why Valentine’s Day is so great. This is why I am so thrilled that our society has embraced a day all about love. Because once a year, something chubby and diapered and only half as cute as my son shoots and arrow right in the middle of our relationships and reminds us to turn up the love volume. And even if your relationship is full of fireworks and rainbows on February 13th, it never hurts to try a little harder to show the people in our lives how much we love them.

Don’t wallow in self-pitty today. Don’t count the amount of dollars spent. Don’t just be loving today on this one day. Pick out those people in your life who mean everything to you and love them better. Valentine’s Day is a reminder to love. Today. Tomorrow. Every day. Maybe you don’t need that reminder. I do.

What my husband and son woke up to. I hope they know how desperately I love them.

In light of some comments I’ve received, I want to state that this post is mostly about my experience as a parent, not the Halifax transit strike. I used the Halifax transit strike as a way to explain my feelings of being out-of-control, because the reality is, I have no control over what is going on and I have to adjust my life accordingly. So, it is an apt example. But, even though it isn’t the crux of my post, since I mentioned it I do want to say that none of my frustration lies with the drivers and employees themselves. I respect them and always appreciate any interactions I have had while riding public transit. I am frustrated by how the strike is turning out. This is not anti or pro union. Both sides have frustrated me. And, as the title suggests, I recognize I am being slightly over-dramatic about things. So please bear that in mind. Also note, I will no longer allow anonymous comments to stay on the blog. Again, let me state that this post is about my experience as a parent and how events in my life teach me about parenthood. That is what is important here. That is what I always try to write about on my blog.

There are certain things that come along with parenthood. Of course, the term itself implies that there is a child. But beyond that, parenthood automatically bestows a person with new responsibilities, rights, privileges, and control.

I remember how firmly I held onto control as soon as I was pregnant with Cameron. The experience of seeing those two little lines on a home pregnancy test when we had not been trying to get pregnant left me feeling so out of control that I grasped at whatever I could to offset that. Thankfully, although the process of being pregnant is so entirely organic, there was a lot I could control. I could control what foods and vitamins I put into my body. I could control what vaccines I (and later my child) would receive. I could control whether or not we would keep the sex a secret. I could create a very controlled birth plan, and dictate who would be with me in the delivery room. I tried to control the visitations we received after the birth. Although the natural processes inside of me and my baby took over more often than not, I could control the environment around me and the people I surrounded myself with.

Actually having a living, breathing child under my supervision entitled me to a whole other level of control. In partnership with my husband, I determined when the baby needed to eat and when the baby needed quiet time. Although this was mostly directed by the demands of my newborn, I realized that I understood his needs so much more than others around me did, so I took charge when it came to reading those signals. I was fierce and protective. And I was allowed to be. I was a mother. It was my right.

I held the control over this child’s life.

And as my child grows, I continue to hold the control over his life. Bedtime. Discipline. Rules. These are my rights and my responsibility as his parent.

So, when I start to lose control, I start to crumble. Very, very quickly.

As my husband and I built our lives, we made a few key decisions that dictated the way we would live. As a family who can only afford one vehicle but chose not to pay the exorbitant price of living in the heart of the city, public transportation became one of those “controls” in our lives that we chose. I am actually a proud public transportation user. I love the fact that each day, I avoid sitting idle in the throng of rush-hour, not experiencing all the personal and environmental stress that is associated with this type of commute. And I sometimes usually love the daily exercise and fresh air that I receive by walking to and from the ferry (although I must admit that this gets harder the further into pregnancy I get).

Photo courtesy of my husband, Dan O'Rourke

I never realized just how much our lives were built around public transportation until it was taken away from us.

Currently there is a transit strike in Halifax. And after sitting in bottleneck traffic for half an hour and only progressing two blocks on the first day of the strike, we realized that we simply could not juggle daycare time constraints and rush-hour traffic all while maintaining our regular work schedules. This was even before trying to find parking downtown. Life had all of a sudden spiralled out of control.

While I tried to find a solution for this transit problem that would work for my family (a solution that would eventually find us paying for daycare despite keeping our son home and working split shifts so that my husband and I could both avoid rush-hour and take care of our child), I found myself fuming with anger. As a socially conscious person, I was angry that those with limited mobility (which at 30 weeks pregnant, I would consider myself to be) and those with lower incomes are the ones who are suffering the most during this strike. As a taxpayer, I was angry that in a time of economic stress, this union believes it should be receiving raises when everyone else in the world are tightening their belts. Selfishly, I was angry that transit workers, some of whom are less educated than I am, are earning more than $20,000 more than I am, and still the union is demanding more.

But mostly, I was angry because all this control I thought I had over my life had suddenly been taken away.

If I have learned anything in the last year, it would be that things start to get really bad when I feel completely out of control. My health suffers. Currently, I am exhausted. I have literally had a headache every day since the strike started. My family suffers. My husband and I rarely see each other any more. My patience with my son gets thin after working for seven hours and then solo-parenting for the next seven. My responsibilities suffer. I have absolutely no time to get anything else done in my life apart from working and parenting.

Losing control is nothing more than letting something else take control of your life that has no right doing so.

So maybe I have been wrong all along about control.

Maybe parenting has nothing to do with control. Maybe it is all about lack of control.

Because, really, who knows what to expect when looking at that first positive pregnancy test? You can do everything right and still have no baby at the end. Or, labour comes, and despite a perfectly thought-out birth plan, we enter that delivery room with absolutely no idea about how things will actually progress. Even as I prepare to go through my second child-birthing experience, I can’t lean on my experiences last time to dictate how things will happen this time. Women can plan to breastfeed and still be faced with complications making it difficult or impossible. Bedtimes can be created and yet it doesn’t mean the child will go to bed easily or sleep through the night. Rules are set for children and still those rules get broken. Discipline can only be enforced for so long until the child grows up and becomes accountable for himself. Children grow up and new people enter their lives: babysitters, teachers, friends, spouses, all vying for more and more control over this child’s life and attention.

And here I am. Mama. Watching all this control I so foolishly thought I was entitled to slip through my fingers like grains of sand.

Maybe this is what parenthood is tying to teach me: That control is an illusion. And until I can learn to accept that, until I can learn how to relinquish control, my life will be fraught with unexpected yet unavoidable hurdles threatening to take control of me.

I’m not there yet. I don’t even know if this realization has allowed me to loosen my grip on my control issues even a little bit. But it is a step. A step to maybe, just maybe, becoming a better parent.

… a better parent who is still angry about this transit strike.

There is a lot to consider when starting a family. So many of the unknowns and the possibilities are exciting. Some are unnerving. Others are downright frightening. But mostly, the idea of starting a family and doing all sorts of family-things together is pretty darn wonderful.

But I have always been worried about one family-related thing in particular: Cake. I knew that as a Mom, I would be in charge of the birthday cakes. When I started dating, I took pride in being able to show my affection by baking my loved one a cake. But as time went on, and as each consecutive cake proved that I had absolutely no cake-baking abilities, I started to rely on specialty bakeries and Dairy Queen more often. When Dan and I were first married, I continued this tradition. I spent good money on gourmet cupcakes and supermarket delicacies.

But I knew things would have to change when I had children.

Unless you are one of those Moms who spend thousands of dollars catering a single birthday party, baking cake for your child’s birthday is just kind of expected of the Mom. And in the world of Pinterest and baking blogs and Martha Stewart, those cakes are expected to look perfect. I managed to do an okay job with Cameron’s first birthday.  Thankfully, the Monster theme we chose lent itself to anything but perfection.

Well, we are once again into birthday season in this household. And now that I am a Mom and I proved myself at my son’s first birthday, I have taken on the designated role of birthday cake baker in my family. After spending copious amounts of hours on Pinterest and perusing cake recipes (tricking myself into believing that the instructions are actually as simple in execution as they appear on the screen), I bravely ventured into the unknown and asked my husband what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday.

After a few days of hemming and hawing, he finally came to me with his verdict.

I want a cake that you and Cameron make together. Just a simple boxed cake that you and Cameron pick out and bake, together.

But. … But. … But. …

What about an ice cream cake? What about a caramel banana cake? What about a Nutella swirl cheesecake cake? (What about any number of recipes that make my mouth water but that, I’m sure, will only cause me stress and anguish when I actually try to make it?)

Nope. Just a simple (boring?) cake mix from the grocery store.

So Cameron and I went to the grocery store. Together, we chose a mix (marble), an icing (milk chocolate), a package of decorating icing (red), and sprinkles (stars). And on Saturday, the day before my husband’s birthday, Cameron and I sat around the coffee table in the living room (yes – the LIVING ROOM!) with our box of cake, our mixing bowls, our egg carton, and our measuring cups. With my two big hands, his two little hands, and a lot of mess, Daddy’s cake started to take shape.

The cake turned out. It didn’t look like one of my Pinterest pictures, but it didn’t look completely unappetizing either. The cake itself hadn’t come out of the pan perfectly. The icing was uneven. The lettering wasn’t centred. The star sprinkles were likely covered in toddler slobber and were clustered in one small area where my son was determined to put them all.

But I won’t remember that part of the cake, and neither will my husband. We will remember the fun that filled our house as Cameron and I put the cake together. As he poured in the oil and counted out the eggs. As he took his baby spoon and “swirly, swirly, swirly”ed the chocolate batter in with the white batter. As he stood on a dining room chair in the kitchen and shoved handfull after handful of crunchy sprinkles into his mouth, pausing briefly to place a few on the cake.

And I will remember the proud look on both of my boys’ faces as I cut a piece and handed it to them.

Sometimes as the woman in the family, I try to be everything to every one. Wife and mother and employee are my designated roles. But sometimes, many times, I try to be more than that – entrepreneur, housewife, chef, photographer, nutritionist, event planner, and world class baker. I want to be perfection for my family. But in trying to do so, I come up short, like my pathetic attempts at baking cake often do, messy and crooked and crumbly. Sometimes it is just good to remember that even a simple, cheap, pre-mix can often create a better family experience than anything fancy ever could.

Previous Weeks

I was so excited about this past weekend. I was finally going to meet my new niece Ella. And although this brand new baby was the primary purpose of our trip, I was mostly excited to bring together my entire family in its current form. My parents, two sisters, one brother-in-law, my husband, one toddler, and (now) one itty bitty baby. Our family is very quickly growing but this growth makes it harder and harder for us to all converge together. So, I was absolutely thrilled that this weekend would find us together, filling new rolls and old. One of us is now a new mother. Another a father. For the first time my husband and I are an aunt and an uncle. My son is no longer the baby any more and my parents are now able to call themselves grandparents to two.

Family. So much rides on that one little word.

Unfortunately, our trip was shortened considerably because of a winter storm that passed the night we were supposed to leave. The following morning, my husband woke up with what he thought was the beginning of a flu.

So Cameron and I left. Minus one husband. Minus one Daddy.

It took us about seven hours to travel the normally four and a half to my sister’s house. At times, I felt like we were stopping at every exit so that I could fix the boy’s movie, get gas, stretch our legs and have a pee, indulge in some food, or re-energize my incredibly sleepy eyes.

Driving alone with a child, even a child who was as well behaved as my son was, isn’t easy. (Thankfully, we met up with my parents before the last two hours of the drive, and they not only bought Cameron and I ice cream, but my Mom offered to drive my car the rest of the way). Even though leaving my husband at home meant not needing to hear the grumblings that always come when we partake in a long drive, and even though I had complete control of the radio and the heat, I missed him. I missed parenting with him and talking with him and sitting beside him.

When we arrived at my sister’s house, the house became full of family. Arms reached out to meet and hold the baby. My little boy ran around, playing with the new gift Nana and Papa had brought him. The table was set and dinner was prepared. There was so much commotion. So much perfection.

Family.

But as my parents snuck away to their hotel for the night and as I tucked my son into the crib that Ella was so kind to share with him (as she doesn’t use it yet), there was something missing. Watching hockey before bed is great with Nana and Papa, but it would have been extra special to have Daddy there. The conversation my sister and I shared before bed was so special to me, but I didn’t have someone to share the pride I felt over my son’s good behaviour in the car, how well he did around the baby, and how perfectly he went to bed. And as I pulled the blanket up to my chin in the basement of my sister’s house, I felt so alone – my son up a flight of stairs, my husband a province away.

In the midst of all this family, I could only feel the incompleteness in my family.

Walking into my little apartment after another day of joyful family togetherness and many more hours of driving, everything was better again. I didn’t notice the cluttered entryway or the messy kitchen. I didn’t bemoan the luggage that I would eventually have to empty. We were together again. The three of us.

My family.

I was home.

Even though I am slow and am having a hard time finding time, I am still keeping up with my Faces of a Family project (or at least, I am trying to). Today’s picture is a few days late, and I won’t even have posted last week’s photo until this one is uploaded. Be sure to click through so you don’t miss Week 3′s photos.

Previous Weeks

Previous Weeks

April seems impossibly far away in the dead of winter.

As I spend my days walking to and from work in negative temperatures, trying to avoid slushy puddles and giant snowbanks while complaining about this city’s complete inability to make the roads passable, I can’t imagine that in a few short months I won’t be needing the winter boots, fleecy gloves and ice scrapers. I won’t be worried about falling into snowbanks or find myself wondering if I have bundled up enough for the day. Instead, I will be enjoying sun and rain showers and flowers and the fresh smell that spring brings.

I will be enjoying a brand new baby who will enter into our world.

April seems impossibly far away.

We have three more months to get ready for this baby. Three more months to decide if we will move into a bigger place before or after I give birth. Three more months to clean the house, set up a bed, reorganize baby clothes, and decide on a birth plan. Three more months to start discussing names. Three more months to feel completely and utterly overwhelmed. Three more months to really come to grips with the fact that our family will be growing to four.

Because it really hasn’t sunk in yet.

Not for me at least.

Whereas everyone else is pretty sure I will pop any day.

People ask me how much longer I have. “How many more weeks?”, “Must be soon now!”, “Where are you going to put three more months of baby?!”. My boss announces my arrival to meetings by saying “Here comes Laura and the quadruplets!”. My husband is jokes that I might go into labour at any time.

And I laugh. And I say “I still have a full trimester left to go!”.

The point is, I am huge. Or at least I look huge to those around me. And I guess I am feeling huge whenever I waddle hither and thither or every time my hips start to ache in the middle of the night.

But I still don’t really notice it until I turn sideways in a mirror. I never really reflect on just how far along I am until someone comes up to me and forces me to realize that this baby is only a mere trimester away from making his or her arrival.

28 weeks pregnant

One trimester. Three months to realize that it is time to start planning for baby number two.

Only three months.

April isn’t that far away. Not really.

Monday morning. 7 am. I had already been up for an hour enjoying the only 60 minutes of my day that are entirely quiet, entirely alone, entirely mine. The previous night had been fraught with restlessness as we found ourselves awake and cleaning up toddler vomit.

As the clock turned from six-fifty-nine to seven-oh-oh, I came back to bed, sat on it, and looked at my husband.

“What’s the plan?”

Cameron had just been sick not three hours before hand. Despite the fact that we thought he was taking a turn for the better on Sunday evening, I was unwilling to send him back to daycare after just having been sick so recently. After some back and forth, discussing days off and who had any left, my husband and I came to the conclusion that it would be best for me to stay home with Cameron that day.

We all stumbled groggily from our bedrooms which had not seen nearly enough action the previous night – or, maybe, had seen too much, depending on your perspective – and started to blindly spoon cereal into mouths caught open in yawns.

“I bet you’re looking forward to a quiet day at home with Cameron.” My husband had decided that The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That wasn’t nearly enough mental stimulation for such a sleepy morning and had decided to start up a conversation with me.

“You know,” I decided to be honest, “when I was contemplating how this day would turn out, I honestly didn’t know if I would rather stay home with Cameron or go to work.”

What a statement, especially from someone who had such a hard time handing over he son to a daycare; from someone who, more than anything, would love to be a stay-at-home-Mom.

Although being at home with my son means staying in the PJs for most of the day and not rushing to and from daycare in the morning in the hopes of catching my ferry; although it means the possibility of a daytime nap and the opportunity to get a few things done around the house, it also means spending the entire day playing with cars or watching Cars or reading books or making lunch or convincing him to nap.

It really doesn’t sound all that bad.

And it isn’t. I love my son. I love spending time with him.

But I’m kind of failing at hanging out with him all alone. I find it exhausting.

Cameron’s getting to a stage where he is clingy. Maybe he is noticing that Mommy finds it harder to play with him or pick him up. Maybe all of this talk of a “New Baby” is making Cameron feel like he needs to be the centre of our worlds. Or maybe, this is just a stage that 22 month-olds go through. But I can’t get anything done when it is just he and I. This kid wears me out.

When nap-time came, I was determined to crawl into my own bed and “nap-when-baby-naps”. But first I straightened up… just a little bit. And then the phone rang. And then my husband sent me a message asking me to do something. And then…

Well, then I made my way to the bedroom, pulled back the covers,

and heard my boy cry. Nap-time was over.

I went into his bedroom. He didn’t stop crying. I tried to pick him up. He didn’t want to be picked up. He just sat there. And cried. And there was nothing I could do. Finally, I picked him up. He wanted down. Then up. Then down. And he kept crying. Together, we went into the living room. He cried. I turned on Cars. He cried. And then, he fell to the floor, on his belly, kicking and crying.

There was nothing I could do.

I just sat in the chair and watched my little boy, feeling completely helpless, utterly overwhelmed.

How the heck am I going to do this in just three months with a newborn?

I know that a lot of this is because I am almost into my third trimester and I am finding it harder and harder to muster the energy that a two-year-old requires. I know that this is because I have fallen out of a routine that works for both myself and my son. I am now in “work” routine, and that works well because I am working. I know that after some frustrating and exhausting weeks, Cameron and the new baby and I will work out another routine that will work well for us while I’m at home.

I know it will get better. I know I will be able to do it. I know these feelings are normal. I know these things logically.

But I still can’t help feeling like I am failing at being Cameron’s Mom and utterly unequipped to be the mother of two children.

Do you ever question your parenting abilities? Did you feel like this when bringing a second child into your lives? How did you cope?

Fridays are tough for me. As the week draws to a close I find myself getting more and more exhausted and more and more ready for a break. I usually find myself trudging home tired and ready for the weekend to start. This past Friday was no exception. It was raining, my boots had all of a sudden decided that they were no longer waterproof, my growing belly felt heavy, and the cold I could feel coming on all week was attacking me at full force. I was looking forward to seeing my family and just doing nothing for a while.

Still, my organizer was full of things I wanted to accomplish on the weekend and my mind was racing with ideas of productivity.

I walked up to the front door of my condo, rung the bell three times and then knocked as I pulled out my key. This is my typical after-work greeting, ensuring that my boys know for sure I am home and giving them time to feign adequate excitement. As I pushed open the door I heard my husband say “Mama’s home” and saw them slowly coming towards the door in greeting. This was odd. Normally “Mama’s home” is followed by “Mama! Hi Mama!” and the pitter patter of little feet running towards me (unless, of course, there is something more interesting than Mama happening elsewhere in the house).

“How’s my family?” I asked.

“Well…” Dan started. “Cam’s been sick. Twice since we’ve been home so far. Which hasn’t been that long.”

And thus commenced a weekend full of sick and flu and wondering when this flu would leave us.

Which means that all of that productivity I had planned never happened. In fact, we did little but clean up sick, try to keep the boy comfortable, and watch Cars. Utterly exhausting.

Here we were, a family worn out, a little boy sick, a weekend lost. And yet, blessings were found.

While Cameron was sitting on the lazy-boy sharing some sick-day snuggles with his Daddy, I heard Dan whisper, “I think God makes good little boys sick so that they can take some time out to snuggle with their Daddies and Mommies.”

Cameron is a loving boy. He gives lots of kisses and even more hugs, sometimes even when asked. He likes to play with his parents and sometimes he even wants someone to sit with him on the couch. But usually, Cameron is an active, fun-seeking boy who doesn’t want to waste any time with cuddles.

So, even though we prayed for health and wished that Cam could be back to his normal self, we found little moments of bliss in all of the snuggle time Cameron required.

This weekend really emphasized what parenting is all about. It isn’t at all easy. It is messy and exhausting and painful. And it is so, unbelievably rewarding. Even though my to-do list grew instead of shrunk, even though I finished the weekend more exhausted than I started it, and even though Cameron spent the whole time feeling absolutely lousy, this weekend provided us with some really beautiful family time, and for that, I am thankful.

*Thanks to my husband for taking so many awesome photos this week and weekend. Otherwise, I fear I might have failed this photo project one week in. Trying to remember to take more pictures, as that is the whole point.*

Previous Weeks:

Week 1

I could talk about my childbirth experience all day long.

It is probably the best story I have. It has everything a good story needs. Action. Conflict. Blood and Gore. Sweat and Tears. Pain. Hard Work. Agonizing Suspense. Climax. And finally, a perfect resolution.

But if you’re thinking about having a baby any time soon, this story might not make be our best conversation choice. It certainly isn’t the story of a simple, easy child birth. And so I try to avoid creating nightmares by telling my story to those people who absolutely shouldn’t hear it – especially women on the cusp of giving birth themselves.

Yesterday was my sister’s due date.

As her due date has approached, she has had to face the realities of giving birth and being a Mom. Or, rather, she has had to face the unknown. Because none of her worries are realities yet. Nor do they have to materialize into realities. So horror stories that were once someone else’s realities really aren’t productive.

But of course, she goes ahead and asks me what happened. In order to “prepare”, she wants to know all possible outcomes. Will she die of embarassment before she even gets to meet her little one if her water breaks in public? Will she enter the hospital hours before giving birth only to be admitted long before she needs to be? Will she be able to get through labour? Will she be in terrible pain? Will she be a good Mom?

As I started to get into my birth story, after persistent asking on her part, I realized that my epic tale might be doing more harm than good.  For as cool as telling a story that spans 38 hours, involves numerous trips to the hospital and torturous methods to induce progress, it really doesn’t begin to describe how awesome the experience was.

Giving birth was really tough for me. When I thought about it, even a few months later, it was something I never wanted to repeat again (Ahem…). But now, when I think about it today, I realize that I received so many blessings while giving birth.

I saw something in my husband’s eyes that I have never seen before, not even on our wedding day. He looked at me with so much love, so much pride, so much awe. Together we shared in this awesome creation of life together and it was in those tear-filled eyes that I really understood the miracle of what had just happened. I have never felt more loved than I did on that day.

My body was utterly exhausted. It was broken and ravaged. And it had just done the most incredible thing it ever had to do. After nine months of creating and growing a person from scratch, it birthed a baby – my baby. Through its weakness and brokenness I recognized more strength in myself than I ever knew was possible. I took part in a miracle. And when the stitches healed and the muscles started tightening again, still, my little, precious boy reminds me of what I accomplished.

The act of sacrificing so much of myself on that day for a little boy who had only just taken his first breaths convinced me that I would be an incredible Mother. Motherhood had taken me over completely.

When I stand back and reflect upon my birth story, I don’t see the pain and the blood and the agony. I really do see something beautiful and miraculous. I see love and strength and accomplishment. I see life.

This is the story I hope my sister hears from me today. These are the blessings I wish on her as she goes through child birth. And when it is all over, then we can share our warrior battle stories. I look forward to it.

This might be the only picture I will ever have of my sister and I pregnant together. The sad part is, we both look equally huge and equally exhausted.
Amy: 38 weeks pregnant; Laura: 26 weeks pregnant 

What are the beautiful things that you remember from your childbirth experience? If you haven’t given birth, what do you look forward to in the delivery room? Let’s start a conversation about the positive parts of giving birth.