1:00AM - wake up due to major coughing jag, lovely
2:00AM - Isaac is staring at me. I come slowly to a state of awareness, he tells me that he wet the bed but “just a little bit.”
2:30 AM - back to bed, laundry is going and something is clicking in there. ARG!
3:00AM - Joshua is crying, my head hurts.
4:40AM - Joshua is really crying, he means business this time. I make him a bottle and change his diaper.
6:00AM - alarm goes off, damn.
6:20AM - alarm still going off and I am oblivious to it. The toddler that crept into my bed at some point is now saying, “Mommy the music is on, I think you should wake up!”
6:30AM - I drag myself to the shower and contemplate the joys and wonders of motherhood…
On March 13, 2004 at 9:02 p.m. Isaac Thomas Stone came into this world. His birth was magnificent, if only for the fact that he weighed 9lbs! I was in labor for 26 hours; I had two epidurals, neither worked. After pushing for more than 2 hours, they used a vacuum to assist in delivery. It was traumatic for me but as of today, 4 years later, I can barely remember the pain. All I remember was seeing him for the first time and thinking that I would never be the same again. And I wasn’t.
My pregnancy with Isaac was fairly uneventful. Life was very difficult at the time I was pregnant, as we lost Kevin’s mom to a battle with cancer when I was about 3 months pregnant. It was very emotionally tough the 6 months between D’Lynne’s death and Isaac’s birth. However, his birth brought healing and comfort to a family in need. Isaac will always remind me that God is a Healer.
Isaac got his name from the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was 90 when God told Abraham they would bear a child. Sarah laughed at God. So, a year later when their baby was born, they named him Isaac, which means laughter. Even in grief, our household is full of laughter and I thought it was appropriate for our first child to be representative of the joy that exists between Kevin and me.
Isaac was a colicky baby, allergic to milk at first. He started out as pretty difficult but by 8 weeks old he was sleeping through the night and giving me very little grief. He crawled at 6 months, walked at 10 months and was pretty much speaking sentences by 18 months. He was and still is an over-achieving typical first child. He has a pretty serious personality and he really likes to understand the world around him and how it works. When he was little, he always had a furrow in his brow. We called him Walter because he looked like a grumpy old man.
Isaac loves music and movies. He will memorize the songs to movies and sing them all around the house. These past few months he has been learning his letter and is fascinated with how things are spelled. I suspect that he will be reading some beginner books in the next year. He derives so much joy from learning. You can see the satisfaction in his eyes when he grasps a new concept. It is contagious.
Isaac is also famous around our house for being precocious and saying very adult things at opportune times. The minute we laugh, he gets this mischievous look on his face and starts thinking of what else he can say to astound us. When he does this, it reminds me of myself as a child and I smile on the inside as I see a part of myself in my firstborn child.
I love my new camera. So if I bore you with pictures, I am sorry but it is my favorite past time. Well, aside from politics and make-up. Seriously.
This morning while Joshua was napping I took some pictures of Isaac and it is shocking to me how much he looks like his father. That stubborn type-A personality of his however, is all Mommy….
Most nights, Isaac requests that I lay with him for a while at bedtime. It is usually just a stalling technique, along with:
”I have to go pee!”
”I need a drink of water” or my personal favorite….
“Daddy said I could play with a toy in bed!”
When I do acquiesce and lay down with him, he begins the chitter-chattering of a 3 year old avoiding sleep:
“Mommy what time is it”
“What does 8 o’clock mean?”
“Why is 8 o’clock bedtime”
“Why are all little boys going to sleep right now”
“Well I’m not tired”
You get the point. So, you can imagine my surprise when I laid down with him tonight and he said nothing. Total silence. He rolled over and clutched his stuffed elephant (Ellie is a new fixture on the bedtime scene these days), wrapped himself in his blanket and was quiet. I could tell that tonight, it wasn’t about stalling. Tonight, it was about me being near him. He just wanted someone to lay close to him while he drifted to sleep. It felt heavenly to be needed in this simple way.
Three year old’s have a way of sucking the air out of the room and the energy from your bones with their constant activity and questions. Isaac has mastered the task of pushing my buttons. In less than 10 words he can have me reeling with frustration.
Tonight though, as he snuggled next to me in silence, his stillness communicated a need to my heart that all mom’s have. We want to know that we are important to our children. We want to know we are necessary for more than just putting on the next DVD, unwrapping a piece of gum or retrieving fruit snacks. We want to know that our children sense the bond between mother and child and desire that deep connection.
Tonight, all of the stress of this week was slowly pulled from my mind as Isaac drifted to sleep holding on to Ellie and my heart.
My sons are three years apart, almost exactly. I found a pic of Isaac from this exact day, three years ago. I thought it might be fun to see the comparison between brothers….
Here is Isaac:
And here is Joshua at the exact same age, almost to the day:
It cracks me up how they look so much alike yet they are also so very different. Clearly blue eyes are one of their common traits.
