There were two...
2003-06-03 there were two. two lines.
and there they were. staring me in the face. my hands began to shake and my stomach started to feel as though i was on a roller coaster.
i jumped up and ran out of the bathroom and jumped back on to the bed where he was fast asleep.
"chris?" i asked as i gently touched his arm. he had to wake up for this. i didn’t care if it was only four o’clock in the morning. he had to wake up.
"huh?" he said as he wiped the sleep from his eyes.
"i have to tell you something," i said. my smile had widened to unbelievable proportions and my voice was starting to tremble from the excitement.
"what?" he asked as a concerned frown formed on his face. he had no clue what i was about to tell him.
"we’re going to have a baby." his frown turned into a whopping grin as he repeated,
"we’re going to have a baby."
10.18.2004 it is unreal how much she has changed my life. i can’t even remember how my life was before i had her. i do remember having a lot of extra time and being bored a lot. especially when he was gone working somewhere far off. she has started making the strangest sounds lately. her newest noise almost sounds like a baby goat. yeah, i said a baby goat. *lol* she will be 9 months old tomorrow and i promise, it is literally hard to remember life before her. i don’t think i want to remember life before her. because she is my life now. and i love every minute of it. my little baby girl. for the past couple of weeks janie and i have been traveling to escatawpa to see chris while he is working over there. as soon as we walk into the little house he is staying in, janie’s attitude changes from a cheerful baby to a very tense baby. we got to escatawpa around 5 friday evening and tricia was there waiting on jerry to get off work. i put janie in her stroller and walked her over to see tricia and jojo. even being outside didn’t satisfy her. saturday janie and i went to mobile to try to deposit chris’s payroll check. (and that didn’t happen because the regions bank that we went to was closed on saturdays.) mom and dad met us in target and we all went to the china super buffet to eat lunch. we left mobile around 3 and janie finally fell asleep at about a quarter till. she was so sleepy. she could hardly hold her little head up she was so sleepy. and yesterday after we came home she slept almost all day. she is so beautiful. i can’t believe that she’s mine.
10.24.2004 this morning when i waved bye to janie, she looked up at me from where she was sitting on the floor and said, “bye!” i looked at michelle and her eyes got as big as mine. neither of us were quite sure that janie was really talking or if she was just making a random sound. so i tried it again. “bye janie,” i said as i waved my hand in the air. “bye!” she said back to me as she smiled the sweetest smile. just to really make sure, i did it three more times. and every time she said bye back to me. my little girl’s first word.
2004.11.03 janie started crawling! it was so jerky to begin with but, she finally got the hang of it. now she gets so mad when we shut the door to the bathroom. she wants to go in there so bad! but i just can’t let her crawl around on the bathroom floor. she is growing up so fast. it’s odd, you know? i can hardly remember life without her, and i feel like i have had her all my life, but at the same time i can’t believe she is growing up so fast! a bit of an oxymoron, huh?
2004.12.10 janie is growing more and more curious every day. she can even stand up by herself now! well, maybe that isn’t exactly correct… i have to stand her up, but she can stand there once someone else stands her up. understand? she is also getting closer and closer to standing on her own literally. she will pull up to her knees. or she will put her hands down in front of her and straighten out her legs so that she is bent in an upside down ‘v’. i keep worrying that she is going to topple over head first, but as far as i know, that has yet to happen. she is getting more and more beautiful everyday. it’s a shame chris is missing all this. it’s almost like he has a full-time life, but a part-time family. i started thinking about it last night. janie consumes about 75% of my thoughts every day.
i had just changed janie’s diaper and set her down in the living room to play while i finished cleaning up. all of a sudden i heard a horrible thud and janie started screaming. she had made her way through my barricade and fallen head first into the heater grate and then rolled over on to her back…still laying on the hot heater grate. i scooped her up as fast as i could…throwing her poopy diaper into the air as i ran. her back was warm from the heater, but she didn’t look burned. she cried and cried and cried. and i cried too. i didn’t know if she was seriously injured or not, but she finally calmed down. we sat on the front porch wrapped up in my hollie hobbie quilt. she loved being outside, even though it was only about 38º. she kept watching the cars and trucks go down the highway. about 30 minutes later it was time for a bath. i took off her shirt and her little arm was all scratched up. the marks don’t look like burns, but more like cat scratches. when i put her into the warm bath water she was fine… until i laid her back to wash her tummy and legs. she started screaming and bawling her eyes out. it was her arm. the warm water was making the scratches sting horribly. i pulled her little arm out of the water and rinsed it off with cool water. of course she was already crying so hard that her beautiful blue eyes were now red from all the tears, and this really didn’t help her feelings. so i bathed her as fast as i could and got her out of that water. it took her about 15 minutes to really calm down from the bath. not to mention that it took a good 20 minutes for her to calm down from the fall. . not only is her arm all mangled up, she has a few scratches on her right cheek as well as a bruise. my poor little baby girl...
poor janie has eaten so many orange vegetables lately that she is beginning to look orange. and when i looked in my pantry this morning most of what i have left for her to eat is sweet potatoes, carrots and squash. so i have got to go to wal-mart and by her some more green vegetables. we are going to cut out the orange ones for a while. even though her favorites are, of course, the orange ones. too bad there is no word that rhymes with orange or we could make her up a cute little nickname. or we could just call her out little orangutan. maybe not. my cute little orange baby girl. *smile*
Leigh Harrell