Grateful for Happy Surprises

Today we were short on clean clothes for Miles. I have not done laundry in uh, a few (read many,many) days and I also haven’t gotten the winter clothes down. So Miles is particularly short on clean pants. And he really loves pants. Not shorts, pants. Even when it is 100 degrees outside.
So as I was digging in his drawer for anything I could pull off as pants, I came across a purple pair that were left over from when Wylie was Larry-Boy for Halloween a few years ago. When I told Miles that they were Larry Boy pants, well that sealed the deal. He has been Larry-Boy the rest of the morning. I even manged to find a yellow shirt and the old purple cape too to complete the outfit.

As I watched Miles run around pretending to be LB, I realized that he is the exact age that Wylie was when we conceived Miles (their due dates were only 3 days apart so it is easy to keep track of.) 3 years ago this month we created our own Happy Accident- Miles. Blame it on Nathan’s cousins wedding and all that romance, combined with Nathan having to wear a Tux. Blame it on my inability to do math correctly, or call it divine intervention, or just biology, but anyway you shake it, 9 months later, here came Miles. An unplanned, happy surprise…

Of course with any surprise it took a while to wrap our brains around it… The being sick again, the sleepless nights again, the brief loss of freedom again… all the things that come with newborns and pregnancy. At least the second time around you realize how much of it is just temporary, but that only helps so much. You still have to go through it all again, one step at a time. There are no short cuts to growth – for you or your kids.

But now we are on the other side. We have reached the point where Miles is the age Wylie was. And it feels so weird. And so great. And it is cool to be able to see things come full circle. We survived! We have made it through another round of breast feeding, bottle feeding, crawling, walking, getting into everything, potty training, not sleeping, etc. etc.

So I am grateful for happy surprises, even the most unplanned ones. And I am grateful for Miles because he is the kid I never knew I wanted (I was expecting a girl you see) and I am grateful that there are moments in life when you can step back and see, just for a moment, the big picture and your life in it. For all those things, I am grateful today.