Fourth birthday.

Happy 4th birthday, sweetie. You would be such a big girl now!

I'm a day late in posting to the blog this year, since life's getting more hectic with a two-year-old in tow. We've driven down from Madrid to Andalucía to spend the holidays in a house in the countryside surrounded by orange trees, lavender, and artichokes. This year Mila's candle, instead of being a quiet zone, is surrounded by toddler chatter and toy cars. Isla is growing into a girl who is sweet, funny, empathetic, and button-pushing all at once. She seems so grown-up to me at two, chatting and flirting and sassing me in both English and Spanish; but I wonder sometimes how different our dynamic would be if Mila were here to be the big girl of the family. Maybe Isla would still seem to me like a baby in comparison. Maybe I'd coddle her more, and maybe she'd lean on her more experienced big sister. Maybe Isla would not be Isla. Maybe we would not have undertaken our Spanish adventure. I'll never know for sure.

Down the path our lives have actually taken, Isla will be the big sister of the family, because we're expecting her baby brother in April. We're firmly in alternate-universe territory now, because this third pregnancy is the one I would not have planned to have if Mila had survived. I'm happy that he and the pregnancy look healthy and normal so far, but it does feel a bit strange to me. I'm definitely feeling the wear and tear more this time. I'm five years older and despite lugging around a 25-pound kid every day, I wasn't nearly as fit when I started this pregnancy as when I got pregnant with Mila. My body's getting creakier and more fatigued by the week. I've had more than my fill of pregnancy and I'm looking forward to hopefully being finished with it for good. 

I also (based on no logic whatsoever, but nevertheless) never expected to have a boy, always having felt like more of a girl mom, especially after having had both Mila and Isla. But here we are! We'll give away our old pink onesies, stock up on more boy-friendly ones, and figure it out.

Scraped up.

D and I went to Turtle Tower for dinner tonight.  I like the one in the Richmond because it's easy to get a table, there's an ice cream shop two blocks down for after dinner, and it's the cleanest one in the city.  (D thinks it also tastes the best, but all the locations taste the same to me.)  It was perfect because I was feeling kind of down, so not in any kind of mood to fight crowds or yell in a crowded restaurant; and also D was starving, and the food always comes fast at pho places.

We were quiet as we ate our noodles, but afterwards he told me a funny story from his run this afternoon.  He was running near the warming hut on Crissy Field, which sits by the water just east of the foot of the Golden Gate (which means it's almost always fogged in at this time of year), where he spotted a kid about eight or nine years old on a bike ahead of him.  As he watched, the kid wiped out and landed on the ground.

"I went over and helped him up - oh, he was fine, he just had a scraped-up knee.  So I asked where his mom was" -- here, I imagined the kid looking back down the road into the fog and realizing he was alone with his bloody knee -- "she was somewhere way back - and then he started crying.  I mean, it was pretty scraped up but I was like, ahh" -- D made a pffft face -- "I've done that to myself like, ten times.  You can show that to your friends later and tell them they're wusses.  Yeah, he was fine but it was the kind of thing you can show off.  So he stopped crying and I walked him back to his mom."

I'd like to see D as a dad (again), someday.

Play.

When I say I am doing all right, it is not a lie.  I am no longer in the featureless, unnavigable fog of early grief.  I get on.  I feel a certain happiness layered over the continuous dull ache.  The acute hurts are little pinpricks of pain in skin that is gradually growing thicker.  They are mostly small or otherwise manageable.

But in my weaker moments, each holds the potential to go straight to the heart.  Songs, places, or moments that take me back to last year.  Pregnant women and pregnancy announcements.  Talk of childrearing or birth stories with happier endings than mine.  Young women complaining prattily, brattily, about their kids or their husbands, totally unaware of how lucky they are.  Oblivious older women rustling out of the office early to pick up their school-aged children, saying to me with an eyeroll, "When you have kids..."  They say it to me knowingly, patronizingly, like elder stateswomen to a young naïf; I smile in response but I think, bitterly, You know nothing.  A part of me is now very, very old.

While other adults sometimes unknowingly cause hurt, I'm surprised to realize that babies and kids often don't.  When babies smile at me, I feel wistful, but I like their open faces and bright eyes.  In Boston this past weekend, I was playing with our friends' four-year-old daughter; during a pause in our play, I leaned in to hear her better, and my pendant swung forward towards her and hung from my neck, swinging.  Her eyes focused on it, her words trailed off, and she unselfconsciously reached out (my heart jumped into my throat) and cupped the little m in her little palm.  And I liked it.  She admired it for a beat, and then asked if I wanted to see her necklace collection - which, of course, I did.  She marched me to her room to tell me about each of her necklaces in turn before leaving them in a shiny tangle on the floor, because next it was time to play going-to-school or bubble fight.  I liked that, too.  Play is good.