Cafe Con Leche

I tried to forget a lot of things about childbirth, but I’ll never forget that moment when the doctor handed me my firstborn, seconds after Daniel said through tears, “It’s a boy!”  Between the in-room hustle of doctors and nurses, counting fingers and toes and the big reality check of the very real-ness of this new little baby, my brain was processing the answer to the surprise we’d been waiting for:  It’s a boy.   

When you don’t know what you are having during your pregnancy, you tend to go down a lot of “If” paths…. “If it’s a boy, then ____,”  “If it’s a girl, then____.”  You imagine how things might be different, and in that moment when the announcement is made in the birthing room, it’s like you never look back.  “We have a son.” 

It didn’t matter what the answer was.  Boy, girl…we were just so thankful we had a healthy baby.  But I carried this little secret worry:  I can see how you like a baby boy, a 5 year old boy, a 7 year old boy…but how do you like an 11 year old boy? Of  course I never questioned love, but in my mind, 11 year old boys were aloof, boring and stinky—it was hard to imagine how you like an 11 year old boy.  

I carried this concern with me for all these years…and today, on the eve of Jesse’s 11^th birthday, I can honestly say, that there is nothing more sweet, wonderful and precious than my 11 year old boy.  I know we have lots of teen years ahead of us, but we’ve just lived through 11 pretty foundational and fabulous years.  I suppose the thing I never really considered in my secret fear was that by the time we got to 11 years old, we’d have made it though 11 years of really falling in love with this sweet blessing.