I'm working on it.

Out of the blue, a gift. A longed for, hoped for, wished for, dreamed of, gift. A surprise. Two little pink lines. And then two more lines. And then two more. Because for whatever reason, the first test is never believable. Neither is the second, but as they say, third time's the charm.

Ten weeks went by. Ten secret weeks of silent excitement.  Ten weeks of whispers after bedtime, talks of tiny sleepers and diapers and little hands and feet.  Ten weeks of secret list making, names and dates and ideas and plans.  Ten weeks of smelling everything, eating less, needing spice and feeling sick.

The night of my younger daughter's fourth birthday, we knew.

An emergency trip to the obstetrician confirmed the bad. And we were sent home to wait. To wait.

Nobody talks about what happens to you when you lose a baby.
No one tells you what will happen.
No one tells you about the utter awfulness of it.

There were some vague instructions from the nurses, and hugs and many quiet 'so very sorry' whispers, and one ugly, abrasive, "I can't help you, have a nice day" from a member of the frontline staff, and that's it.

We went home into the unknown, an unknown that turned out to be dark and hard and painful, physically painful, emotionally painful, utterly awful, and secret.  Secret like the first ten weeks.  This time a secret sorrow, that time a secret joy.

Our baby died and we watched life go on around us.  Two different friends had babies that week, and we could see their newborn pictures in our news feeds, tiny little hands and feet, tiny little baby sleepers, tiny little diapers.  Another pregnant friend complained about her growing stomach, all the while my own seemed to grow smaller and more empty with every minute's passing.

On Sunday, two people stood next to me and asked me if we were trying to have a baby. Was there anything coherent in my stammered reply: "no, not really, well, not right now, I mean, we would love a baby, but no, I guess not really now".  And in my mind, 'bite down hard. don't cry. smile hard'. So that's what I did.

Our children do not know yet. When they ask, "Mommy, why are you crying?" we just reply with a vagueness of our own: "Mommy's heart is just sad, honey.  Sometimes grown-ups have sad days, too".

The other day the words came out, out loud, to a friend. And that night to another. They cried for me. They knew, too. They knew the utter awfulness, too.

Our baby died.

My dear friend sent this poem, along with her love and prayers and the kind of hope that only comes from knowing the truth of life.  It's page has been open since she sent it; I read it and read it and read it.

Our baby died, and is gone, undiminished, to the other shore. We know the One who stands there, receiving those lives, receiving our tiny gift, our little undeserved surprise, the never-dying-soul we knew for a secret ten weeks, and so we have hope.

It is only Tuesday afternoon, but I already feel like I'm running out of time in the week. Sick children and ballet practice, overdue library books and overflowing laundry baskets, dental appointments and language assessments, races and grocery trips - these things seem endless. And I can't imagine what it would be like if we did more than one extra-curricular activity each.

What happens to the time?

...

Math takes up a lot of room. There are lots of pieces to math. Lots of worksheets. Lots of counting blocks. Lots of money. Lots of rulers and shapes and flashcards and erasers and balances and clocks and cubes and charts and stuff. It takes up a lot of room.

There are lots of pieces to school in general. Lots of pens and pencils and erasers and markers and crayons and colored pencils and glue and scissors and paper (and lots of kinds of paper) and folders and pictures and books and more flash cards and more worksheets and rings and binders and more folders. It takes up a lot of room.

And science and history and art and music and geography. These things take up a lot of room.

And we don't even have a real globe yet. (Ours is a blow up model that often sees time spent as a ball.) Or a real microscope, or safety goggles, or a piano.

Also, in addition to all the pieces, these things take up a lot of mental space.

I have long ago forgotten all the reasons why the a and the i and the a and the y say "aaaaa". This is also true for why the e and the a say "eeeee" sometimes and "eh" others. These reasons are filed away in the dark storage room of my getting-older-by-the-minute brain, and it is hard to find the folders, dust them off and recall the facts I used to know.

I have long ago forgotten the names of the properties (all but the commutative) and the rules for where you are supposed to start drawing the four and whether or not it has a square or a triangle as its base. I can't remember what order I learned all my facts in, and if I liked it or if it was beneficial or if it was destructive to my overall comprehension of mathematics. It is all filed away, in the same room as the phonics and grammar rules, albeit a different drawer.

How does one keep up with all of these facts? There are a lot of facts to know. There are a lot of facts to remember, and then there are the reasons behind the facts. This, I've discovered, is the beauty of the teacher's manual.

I have decided today that teaching multiple subjects to multiple ages is hard. After three years of homeschooling, I now understand the joyful existence of co-ops and academies. OHHHHH, so *that's* why you add that one-more-trip-out-of-the-house to the weekly activities list: so someone else can keep up with the science facts.

...

Thank God for the sunshine and the warmer air. The trees are still missing a lot of leaves, but the air smells like spring and the light is finally staying longer in the evenings. I like how it feels to have the doors open in the daytime. The birds are chirping nearly all day, and their songs make for a happy energy.

Soon, soon, soon, I keep telling myself, that soon it will be spring - lovely, color-filled, sweet smelling spring. And then summer, hopefully a long, warm, sunny one, spent by the ocean with these fast-growing girls of ours.

...

Last night, we cooked dinner for two nights. That means tonight I don't have to cook. That is a blessing, a huge, warm hug of a blessing. It removes so much stress from the day to have one less thing to do. The dishwasher will still have to be unloaded (for the third time today) and re-loaded, but that is so small in the grand scheme of things. And I think it also makes the dinner taste even better, to know that it comes with little more effort than warming up a chop or two.

As I sit here listening to the girls sing and color together, all of us waiting for the man of the house (and let's face it, the hero to each of us) to arrive, life seems more manageable than it did fourteen graphs ago. Perhaps it's the coffee.

It's a breezy day here.  The sun is in and out of the clouds which are thick and grey and heavy with coming rain, and the wind is moving them and the trees in every direction.  The light is nice, not too bright, not too golden, not too clear.  It's hard to explain, but everything is easier to see today.

Girl-the-first is sitting on the loveseat in our school/playroom reading book after book after book.  She can't read all the words yet.  But she loves going through all her favorite ones and finding the words she knows by sight: the, a, and, is, this, on, to, in.  She finds them and runs over to me with her small finger marking the exact spot on the page - "Mama, close your eyes!  Now, look, Mama! It's 'and'!"  I like this. I like it a lot.

Girl-the-second is sleeping.  Yes, she is.  She is sleeping soundly in her own room, in her own crib, in her pink sleep sack with no bloomers on.  An afternoon nap.  After sleeping all night last night.  Well, from midnight or so to seven-thirty.  It's incredible.  And restful.  I feel a little sleepy myself.  It's almost as if getting those straight seven hours have made my body and mind suddenly conscious of how much they've missed in the last fifteen months. They both want to shut down and cuddle with a pillow for a few.  They are greedy for more slumber.

As I type this, the pages for next week's kindergarten classes are rolling off my printer.  I'm scanning them ahead of time, and am so thankful for these minutes to do this.  Just a little bit of preparation makes it all so much easier.  I feel like this about most things, but especially school.  It is so much better when my lessons are prepped in advance.  If only I could get this far ahead with my dinners, laundry and grocery shopping.

Aside from the general state of the house (toys everywhere, on everything, under everything, in everything, laundry waiting to be folded, dishes waiting to be put away, and one persistent cobweb on the chandelier), things feel good, balanced, calm.  It is a good feeling.

So many times what I know to be true doesn't translate to feeling true.  And when it does, when what I know to be true also feels true, oh how nice the minutes are.

It is a good reminder to me of perspective.  Despite the hard - despite the sad - despite what can feel like a forever of struggle - life is so, so, so good.  It is better than what we deserve it to be.  I am thankful, filled with gratitude for this goodness.

Like the day Camelot fell, or the day mankind got high, or the day the music died, I will always remember where I was when it happened. I'm talking about the big East Coast (represent) Quake of '11 (that's Oh-One-One, y'all). Not that wimpy mess out in Colorado. What was that anyway? A two point one?

Anyway, back to my story. This is for posterity.

It was an ordinary day in Savannah, Georgia. The kids were up, lunched, schooled and cleaned. The kitchen was a mess, crumbs from the sixteen different types of food I'd tried to feed my one-year-old for lunch littered the counter and the floor around the stove. The laundry I'd been working on for the last month, week, day, along with a random menagerie of toys, lay in small piles around the old dining room, while even more toys and dirty socks (my one-year-old likes to carry them around in her mouth during the day, but that's another story) found scattered homes throughout the living room. I still needed a shower after the two-diaper-change poop incident, and the kids were sort of sharing a toy with one another in the playroom.

"Finally," I thought as I set my lukewarm water down on the desk. "I can finally get this space organized." I sat down at the worn chair, pulled the trash can closer to me and began sorting through the stack of mail and miscellaneous paper.

And then it happened.

My phone, which was sitting on the desk next to me, began shaking. At first I didn't know what to do. I glanced at the kids and then back at the still shaking phone. It made a surprisingly annoying sound as it knocked against the wood. In that moment, I decided. I grabbed the phone, hit the slider bar and knew immediately exactly what was happening.

It was my breaking news alert from the Washington Post, letting me know that I had just experienced an earthquake.

When I look back on it now, it all makes sense. The crumbs on the kitchen floor, the scattered clothes and toys, the pacing cat, the unhappy sounds coming from the girls as they struggled to hold onto the same toy, their small hands just barely able to keep it supported ... it was the quake. And all I can say is thank God we are all safe.

I mean, "We all almost died."**

This afternoon I learned that our friends, two people we love and have spent many good times with, are ending their marriage.

I don't want to gossip about it, or debate the faults. I'm just sad.

Sad for them. Sad for their children. Sad for their futures without one another. Sad for the memories of the good times that will be hard to remember now. Sad that it's really happening.

Sad that it's at the end.

Things here are hard. It's how life is. And the end of a marriage, no matter the ins and outs or the whys or hows, is a terrible rending of what was made to be one, a whole, together. It matters not if the hearts leave as friends or foes; the leaving is still a leaving, a tearing, a pulling apart of what was once meshed with hopes of forever.

My heart hurts for them.

Press on.

Two days ago:

My sweet, totally precious little baby girl will not sleep. It seems to me as if there was a time when she did sleep. But I could be making that up. I mean, it's been so long since I slept like a regular person, I'm sometimes not sure what I'm remembering and what is wishful, wishful day-dreaming.

It's hard to be a good mother. I know some people say it's not hard, that it just comes naturally, but I disagree. No matter how much you love your children, no matter how long you waited for them, being a good mother does not come naturally.

"Are you sad, Mama?" she asked.

"No," I replied. "Mama is just thinking about things."

"Oh," she said. "I'm thinking about things, too."

"What are you thinking about?" I asked her.

"Well, Mama," she said. "I'm thinking about you."

"Me?"

"Yes, Mama. I'm thinking about how kind you are and how good you are and how good you are at playing outside with me."

The jazz is pretty good. It's left over from the seventies, and tonight, it is the background for blogging. We're having 'movie night' - sans picnic, which is our usual accompaniment to this kind of entertainment. A regular movie night includes pizza and ice cream at our little play table in the playroom. Alas, tonight, we ate a boring old dinner at the regular table. Still, the Aristocats hasn't lost its charm, and O'Malley and crew seem to be making up for the absence of Little Caesar's and vanilla dish.

It's just on eight o'clock here. Both the girls are asleep. The husband is well out the door. I am wearing my new birthday slippers (and they rock) and drinking coffee that is hot. Not cold coffee as is usually the case. Not even lukewarm coffee, which is the kind I am so thankful to get on Saturdays when my mister is home to help. But hot, just-about-burn-your-tongue-but-still-perfect-for-drinking coffee.

I.am.so.tired.

Today was one of those days ... the kind of day that there's no way to pretend your way through ... the kind of day you just have to push hard against ... kind of like kicking your way back to the surface of a fast flowing river after a sharp and unexpected plunge to the bottom.

The lack of sleep is starting to get to me. I think I sense it most in my apathy toward the number of cupcakes I'm eating in one day and in my inability to find a pair of matching socks.

Child-the-first is bearing up well. She has a few dark circles, but really, I'm amazed at how well she functions on so little sleep. Today, while she did stay in her bed during afternoon quiet time, she didn't sleep one wink. In fact, she confessed to her sweet papa that she 'read the whole time'.

Child-the-second is bearing up, but I think today's shriek-fest proved the bearing is definitely not in the upward direction. I don't know if I've ever heard a baby scream so loudly for such a long time with no breaks. And it's not like I haven't been around colicky babies before.

Husband-the-hero arrived home in the nick ... and somehow, God bless him, he managed a trip to the store with both girls, (yeah, for more cupcakes ... and rust-free beer), during which the younger fille made not one peep. In fact, le bebe deuxième was asleep when he returned. Hero-daddy is currently reading to both of them in another room to give me a continued break.

As bedtime nears, my prayer is that both of these tiny persons will fall asleep quickly and deeply and stay that way until well past sunrise. I'm old and not used to this kind of night time party anymore, and frankly, the cupcake-crutches I'm depending on are starting to add up ...

Pressing on.

That's Laundry. With a capital "L". "L" for lots and lots of laundry. "L" for little clothes for little people that are literally resting in large piles outside the little ones' bedroom doors. "L" for loved, which is what these little people are: loved by those who gave them all these clothes and loved by those who will wash them. "L" is for bLessed ... which is what we are, to have so many items with which to clothe our little ones' bodies.

"L" is also for laughter ...
feel free to exercise some as you envision me in my scrubbing gloves standing over the utility sink with my favorite little blue bottle ...

So. It's now been 4 months and 24 days since we added one to our three. Life as four is good. It is a new kind of good. A kind of good I guess you don't know exists until you get there. Because three was good, too. And I really didn't think it could get better than the good we had at three. And yet, this new kind of good changes what I thought of the word before four existed.

things ...