She keeps me laughing, this one does.
I was sure our little family was complete. I had my hands full with two preschool age children and a husband who spent 250 of the 365 days of the year gone on a ship. On top of that, and a part time job, I was babysitting two little boys twelve hours a day on the days I didn't work. My life was full. Overly full. And yet something was missing. I wanted another little girl. I told the Lord I wanted a little girl, one with "laughing eyes and curling hair".
And then I forgot about it, because we were moving from our little apartment to a big townhouse in San Diego and I again had my hands full.
I will never forget that realization that something wasn't quite right. My clothes got tighter and tighter and I thought I was regaining all the weight I had lost the previous year. It didn't make sense. I sat down and cried. And then it occurred to me what the problem might be. I took the test and when it came out positive I cried some more. Such is the way with pregnant women. The Mr. was so sweet. He took my hands in his and smiled and said We're going to have a BABY! No worries!
But what would we do? We had long ago given up the cribs and baby clothes, bottles and million other things that went with having a baby. We weren't rich, as a matter of fact I think that year we might have made a whopping $24,000 dollars. We began to slowly gather the things we would need. And then my friends and co-workers at Michael's decided to throw me a baby shower. They wrapped up everything but the kitchen sink in baby shower paper and signed a giant card and wished me well.
She came squalling into the world on a beautiful morning in May. I had told the doctor, when she asked how much I thought she would weigh, that this third baby should be somewhere in the middle of the other two, and so she was. At 7.14 lbs she was three oz. less than her big sister and three oz. more than her big brother was at birth. And her hair was right in the middle, light brown, curly. Neither light like her brother's, nor dark like her sister's. And her eyes were blue.
She was the oooh and ahhh of the neighborhood I lived in at the time. When she cried she mewed like a kitten. Smiling at just one week of age, whether from gas (as they say), or a pleasant dream, she charmed the world.
She entered kindergarten and I watched her carefully. She was my baby, the last of my babies, and it seemed to me that she was more defenseless than the other two. I was happy with her kindergarten teacher initially, because she looked like a sweet old granny, but I was wrong. This woman was not sweet. There was never a day that she didn't find fault with my baby and it irritated me to no end. She even went so far as to tell me She will never make it in the first grade. Never. However, when first grade came around, she did fabulous. She had a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Rivers, and she progressed wonderfully.
Through the years she has battled many odds. She was diagnosed with a learning disability and a lesion in her brain when she was in the fifth grade. She was put on medication and immediately began to do extremely well in school. She has overcome many of her difficulties, and no longer has to take medication at all. She is an honor roll student. When she was about seven she began to make rudimentary drawings in paint shop on her computer. She continued to use paint shop to draw over the years as an artistic outlet. One day I was sitting next to her on my bed and I looked over at her computer. She was looking at a comic strip, or what I thought was a comic strip from the newspaper. I realized that what I had been looking at was not a professional comic strip but was her own work. She is fabulous. (I like that word.) Her work is fabulous. I see her in a graphic arts career when she is older. She is that good. She doesn't show us, we just get a peek now and then. I got a peek last night, and what I saw blew me away. I wish I could put some of it up on this blog, but she is very private. And she writes stories to go with her paint shop paintings. Books actually. I will never forget walking in her room without knocking one night. She hid something under the covers. I asked her to show me and she pulled out a DS game container. I don't know why she was hiding it, and I never did find out. I told her we don't hide things, and the next day while she was at school I went in her room and looked through all the game cases. Never found a thing worth hiding, but what I did find was the first of her many books. It was a full spiral, front and back, single spaced story of all the escapades of a girl that she made up, written in the style of Pokemon, of course. Now she writes on her laptop, so I don't find books laying around anywhere, but I know she still spends a majority of her time writing stories and drawing illustrations.
She is impressive, that one. Stormy, loyal, loving. Everything is black and white to her. No cussing. She hates PDA. She wants order in her world. She has brought order to my own world. Taught me patience, and how to temper my words, and not just throw what I am thinking out there. She is a good kid, with a very dry wit about her. Her teachers have told me that sometimes when she makes a comment they have to turn away to disguise their laughter or they would burst out in class. She is funny. I thank God for her every day. She is a child after my own heart. I understand her. Well most of the time, anyway. And I always love her.
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