Like this:

Two lovely friends had passed on to me just about all of the baby things I would need as hand-me-downs.  Now, they had friends who could use those things, so I packed them up and returned them today.

I sorted things out a couple of days ago.  I tried to fold the sweet clothes neatly, but just like when I start out chopping an onion so uniformly, there quickly comes a point where the tears are burning my eyes and I give up…get my other hand out of the way and just start hacking.  So, I just dumped it all in a Hefty.  Then I threw a leetle tantrum…and scoured the pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding books off my shelf and threw them in the recycling bin.  I tore out the pages from the binder provided by my midwifes, and threw them in the recycling bin, and threw the notebook in the garbage.  I know…this could have gone in my irony post…tearing out the papers to recycle while throwing away a perfectly good binder, and recycling perfectly good books.  I know.  But like I said, and I can admit it…it was a tantrum.

It wasn’t my first in recent memory.  In the midst of labor, when I was starting to feel the effects of no sleep the night before and more intense contractions, I threatened my Mom and Julia with a tantrum…told them, I’d like to just throw myself on the floor and kick and scream.  Something my Mom pointed out, I didn’t even do as a child.  But would it make any difference, I wondered? It wasn’t my finest point, I’ll admit, but I really did kind of want to.

I’ll blame Eloise, which the girls and I had been reading together.  A silly little character who I could almost find charming, if I didn’t have a nagging feeling that her life is probably terribly similar to what Paris Hilton’s might have been like as a child.  I had tried to lighten the hospital bit with the girls by pointing out that it was alot like the Plaza…and, “Ooooh, I just looove the Plaza.”  And look, a menu to order room service…”I rawther prefer room service!”  I guess her influence wasn’t entirely bad.

So yesterday, I acted like a good little girl, and I returned some of the things a couple houses up to Kate, and the others I hauled to the car and we drove over to Jennifer’s.  I took care to pack everything in the back such that the carseat didn’t actually end up in the seat where it was supposed to end up, where Izabelle wanted it next to her, and all of the little baby toys they were so excited about I packed in Hefty amidst some clothes, lest one of the actual children of the family were tempted to throw a tantrum.

Afterwards we stopped by a park, where I swear there was, and not surprisingly I suppose, a disproportionate amount of pregnant women and babies.  I watched as Izabelle befriend a girl…a girl who had a baby brother, of course.  She took Izabelle over to his pram to meet him and Izabelle stroked his cheek.  Her Mom was doing the whole chat on the cell phone while pushing the baby’s pram back and forth by inches and gazing annoyingly up at the sky bit, so luckily, Izabelle didn’t spill the family beans to her.  I don’t know if she said anything to the unsuspecting little girl, but in the car, she told us about him, and her eyes got a bit teared up.  Mine did too.

There was a bright spot in the day though, when Jennifer gave me two handmade gifts she had made for baby.  She knew I was looking forward to the one she had told me about, and knew that both, little, beautiful,  crocheted toys, could still be enjoyed by the bigger kids.  The girls and I took turns holding them like precious treasures…precious, healing, handmade treasures…all the way home.  Then we found them a home on the little low shelf I had been reserving for baby’s things.  So much was taken out of our life with Hickory’s loss, but we have these sweet reminders of the love that we received in his passing, and that helps us through.

Advertisement