Fall Photos

Eliana and Eliana posed for a photo.

Annea and Eliana leaned on each other.

My girls!

Annea's smile: beautific but hard to photograph. (Not that you will tell from today's post, full of her sweet grin, but believe me we have mannnnny pictures that miss her smile.)

Tired girls taking a nap.

She's part of our fall decorating, lacquer box lid as hat.

Pumpkin patch! Officially the start of the holidays for us.

How amazing is this picture? It's our best one of all three girls to date. Amazing!

We are doing well. Adessa is loving kindergarten. She seems totally herself, eager and bright and she absolutely couldn't care less what the other kids think of her, which I love. I wish it could stay forever, that strong sense of herself. Calvin worked in the classroom and overheard her telling another student: "Well, that's the way you do it in your family, but that's not how we do it in our family." Matter-of-factly explaining herself.

Eliana is loving Playschool, too, and I love my mornings off with her and the baby. The other morning as we were getting ready to get everyone out the door to their respective places of care or learning or work, Eliana marched into the kitchen. "Mom," she said, "so, listen to my plan: the sound machine is still on."* Good plan, Eliana!

*I've been lying and telling the story that she said: "So, Listen to my plan: the alarm clock is going off." because who has a sound machine? We do, none of us can sleep now without blasting white noise of some kind. It seemed easier to falsify the story to make it more easily understood, but then, here for posterity, I had to come clean.

Annea is a human package of slobbery softness. She is talking, mostly very high pitched, and also into making a gargling sound(?). She is rolling around, has found her feet and loves those fun things I put on them, so tasty--we've had some seriously soggy socks. She enjoys grabbing and scratching at things, most disturbingly my food, now. Yes, that time has come, I'm washing her hands if I don't get my plate away in time. She loves watching her sisters entertain her. She is sooooo tremendously easy. When she does squawk, it entirely derails my plans, because I have now figured-in her calm, quick-to-sleep, no complaining/no fussiness, to my expectations of life. As long as I keep on top of feeding her and giving her frequent naps, she is a dream. And even her version of crabbiness is pretty dreamy, too. Thank you, God. I am thanking God for her mellow nature all the time.

We have had colds, pretty significant ones, and by the time Calvin gets home from work after his long day, I am wiped out. I see the difference having three kids makes as I'm a little more tired, and there are a few more interruptions of sleep when kids are sick. It makes me glad we're having three, glad to be done and just raising these girls. (Every time I write something like that I feel a little bit wary, like I am tempting fate, and like I had better do something quick! and permanent to make sure that I don't eat these words later. We are planning to do something permanent, but it just isn't happening quick.)

I am in a different kind of funny space about my mom. I wasn't planning to write about her, but am inspired to write about her just now because I had a pang of sadness that she won't be reading this blog anymore. She was my loyal follower, and after every post she would get excited about what I wrote and the pictures and the funny things my girls were doing.

My different funny space is that I feel like her sick self supplanted her regular self in my mind, and I don't miss her sick self. It was five months of sad, weird, traumatic, or all three. It was stressful. It was hard to watch her deteriorate before our eyes. I'm not sure how long I'm going to allow relief to be my dominant feeling, but for now I'm keeping sad at bay. There are glimpses of how much I am going to miss her healthy self, but I can't handle much more than a glimpse right now. I don't know how good that's going to be for me in the long-run of grief over all, but I'm trying to maintain space for whatever my strange process decides to do. Sometime, soon probably, the missing of her is going to seep its way in. And that will be okay, too.