new beginnings

Tomorrow is the first day of second grade. Before we went grocery shopping on Saturday afternoon, Frances suggested we return to our habit of creating a weekly school lunch chart (taken from Feeding the Whole Family, a favorite cookbook) so we'd be sure to buy everything we needed for the first week. Gabriel wanted one too, even though he doesn't start preschool until after Labor Day.

Packing lunches! It's really here. I have my doubts about our ability to wake, dress, breakfast, brush teeth, comb hair, and be out the door by ten of eight tomorrow, after so many lazy summer mornings spent in pajamas. Like the other day, when Gabriel and I decided to tackle the overgrown mess that once was a relatively tidy garden. In our pajamas.

 

We cleared the weeds and tangle of cucumber vines, and planted spinach seeds in their place.

The basil is one of the few crops that have survived my neglect.

And the morning glories have distinguished themselves as a plant that seems to actually thrive the more I ignore it and let the weeds and bugs have a party all along the trellis they climb.

But oh dear. This garden stuff is well and good, but now I think I am just hemming and hawing, delaying a bit of news I've been wanting to share for some time.

Would you like to know why I have been such an awful gardener this summer? Besides lack of experience, an aversion to mosquitoes, and a preoccupation with collecting lots of continuing education credits to reinstate my social work license...? Pregnancy, my dear friends! We are having another baby. And my first trimester, which is now coming to a blessed end, knocked me squarely on the tuches, as my ballet teacher (circa 1985) would say. Oy, the exhaustion! These past weeks, if my family had clean clothes to wear and something to eat for dinner, it was a good day.

I am thirteen weeks and four days in. This morning Mike, Frances, and Gabriel accompanied me on a prenatal appointment at the birth center where I am hoping to deliver (in the vicinity of March 1). We heard the heartbeat! Like a miniature pony galloping away, either underwater or in a wild wind storm. It is an extraordinary sound, isn't it? I had been looking up at the ceiling, holding my breath and praying the midwife would find it quickly - I badly needed reassurance that there was indeed a tiny person growing in there - and the moment she found it, tears of relief and gratitude came to my eyes. I turned my head and found Mike's eyes smiling at me, then Frances's eyes looking awed, then Gabriel's eyes looking incredulous: is that really the baby?

My son soon began dancing, as is his wont, to the fast-paced beat. We really filled that little examination room.

So we are all well, striking out into new unknowns. Another year at St. John's, second grade, the 4's class, new social work ventures (I did indeed finish those CEUs and am now an LGSW in Maryland again)--and in the midst of all of these transitions, we are all keenly aware of a mysterious, quiet, and persistent presence. A new person is getting ready to join our family.