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We are having our fifth baby!

We’re really excited and we’ve been surprised by others’ excitement when we told them.  We thought we’d get a lot more eye rolls or aghast expressions, but mostly we’ve felt nothing but love and joy from our friends and family.  Shoppers at Costco don’t know yet because I’ve yet to take all four while my bump has been visible.  We’ll get those aghast stares yet, folks.

Each of our previous children have arrived before the prior child turned two, so this feels like a huge gap to us.  Jameson will be about 7 weeks away from his third birthday when the baby is born, and that is eons older than the 21-months-old twins we brought Hunter home to, or the 3.5-year-old twins and 22-months-old Hunter we brought Jameson home to. His ability to talk, understand, obey, and generally function will be light-years easier than our prior experiences.

We also feel really unfazed, and that’s the blessing of time and experience.  We’re not holding our breath or totally freaked out.  When Jameson joined the family, it didn’t make waves the way the first three did.  He synced into our lives and brought happiness, not strain.

We anticipate a similar experience with this baby, because really, what other option is there?  That’s the secret behind larger families that we’re discovering: your first child alters your universe, the second rocks your world, the third overturns the apple cart, but the fourth has to roll with what’s already there.  The fifth?  They are allowed very few demands, by necessity.  We already have routines, school schedules, commitments, structure, and the baby will hopefully jump right in.

Maybe I’ll read this six months from now and weep from my own ignorance, but I doubt it.  It’s funny how we’re finding that though life is much busier, wilder, and louder with more kids, it’s not exponentially harder with each additional kid.  The bell curve shoots straight up from kids one and two and then kind of levels out.  From what I’m told, most people opt out of kid 3 and 4 because they assume (and why wouldn’t they?) that the bell curve rockets straight into the sky indefinitely — and who could live like that?  But it doesn’t.

For instance, I’m not making more dinners or driving more places…I’m just doubling a recipe and setting one more place at the table, and dropping more kids at the same school.  Do you see what I mean?  We don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

The real sweetness is in their relationships with each other.  Mike and I could not be more obsessed with our kids, but we know the long-term blessing is what we’re giving them in each other.  Watching them run out of the house every day to play football in the yard (with two vs two they can actually make do even if the neighbors aren’t home), or hearing Arden and Hunter play school in one of their rooms, or seeing Henry wrestle both boys, these are the moments when our effort in the daily grind is nothing compared to the joy before us.

I’m constantly amazed by the lightening of my load in other ways too.  It wasn’t long ago that I was pushing a double stroller with a baby on my chest, and now I have four kids racing ahead on their bikes, leaving me hands-free to jog behind them.  It’s so easy!

The car, though.  The car.

Everybody asks what on earth we’re going to do about our car.  We drive a minivan, obviously, but all the kids are still in car seats.  So if we put the middle seat back into the middle row (it’s captains chairs right now), how will two kids access the third row?  We can’t fit three car seats across the back row, or we’d do that.  The twins are still in five-point harnesses, but we’re thinking it’s time to switch to lap belts — still, that doesn’t reduce the size of their car seat, it only changes how they’re strapped to it.

We are seriously considering a sprinter van, which would make us look like we’re delivering Amazon Prime packages, but I may have to make my peace with that.  I don’t think I can do a Suburban, because I’d lose my auto-open van doors, which are the crown jewels of my loading-kids-in-the-car experience.

I don’t spend my days thinking about February when the baby will be here.  I spend much more time savoring being pregnant.  I love it wholeheartedly, and every day I walk around ecstatic that I get to do this again.  It’s glorious feeling the kicks, it’s fun to have to quasi-waddle or hold my hands on my back like a pregnant woman in an 80’s movie, I love when my body demands that I lay down for ten minutes because it feels so good, I love that I am eating what I want and still exercising, I love wearing maternity clothes again…I could write endlessly about my love of being pregnant.

And having had several kids, I know what’s ahead with a newborn, so I am consciously grateful every day that this baby doesn’t yet need to be fed, held, rocked, nursed, quieted, soothed, bathed, changed — nada!  This baby just hangs out silently inside me, eating what I eat (sorry about Halloween, baby), sleeping when I walk, and waking and kicking when I lay down.  It is the greatest.

The kids can’t wait, though like last time, they’re toeing the party line on baby’s gender.  Boys want a boy, Arden wants a girl.  We’re talking often of preparing our hearts either way, so no one bursts into disappointed tears in the delivery room.  I think they’ll see the little bundle in a blanket and newborn hat and fall in love either way.

I’m almost 29 weeks, so we’ve a little over two months to go.  To say each pregnancy goes faster than the last is an understatement, but I also know that the baby stage goes faster each time, so I’m hoping to savor it, even the harder parts.

Mike and I can’t believe we’re going to have five kids.  Five!  It’s bananas, and we’re overwhelmed with gratitude.

Ten years ago, my sister, Erin, told me to take up blogging.  She said this because I was lamenting the lack of jobs in journalism/writing/magazines, or lamenting that they paid peanuts.  I had resigned myself to earning a real paycheck in project management in the tech world, but I needed a creative outlet.

“You should start a blog,” she said.  I think I grimaced on the phone because it sounded so cliché, and probably embarrassing.

“Won’t people think I’m a navel-gazer?” I asked.  “What would I even write about?”

She replied that there were dozens of blogs she loved reading that weren’t self-serving, and I’d find topics as I went.

“Just don’t name it after yourself.  Don’t Abby.com.  That’s super annoying.”

Noted.

A few days and many hems and haws later, I posted my first blog about…why I am blogging.  Original!  But I quickly followed up with a story about making over a house in south Seattle, and one about a race to get to the symphony.  I committed to posting every week for a year and I met that commitment.

Was my posting robust after that first year?  Not hardly.

I’ve published 182 posts in ten years, which is very un-Victor Hugo of me, but does mean I met a larger goal of mine: to keep at it.  I cannot count the number of friends and acquaintances who have eagerly started blogs with high ambitions, only to fizzle out after less than a year.  This is not a reflection of their talent, only discipline.

I fault them exactly zero percent, because my last post was…October! October, everybody.  That’s a different year than now.

When I started blogging, I was a working newlywed with no children.  I was 24 precious years old.

Now my marriage is a preteen, I have four kids (two are 5.5, one is 4, and one is 2), and my job doesn’t even pay peanuts.  I enjoy how that came full-circle.

 

 

But!  I know for sure we are far, far more joyful and purposeful than when we began.  And, it goes without saying (but I’m saying it), working a hundred times harder.

Which is the central reason I have failed to blog for so many months.  I just don’t make the time.  I miss it.

A couple of friends and I have challenged ourselves to engage in deep work — writing or creating or researching that takes a minimum of two consecutive hours.  No interruptions allowed, no phone, no internet, no TV in the background.  It’s the answer to so much of what ails us; in fact, it’s worthy of its own blog post, and maybe I should deep work that this evening.  But I have plans tonight.  And tomorrow is Friday.  So maybe Monday.  See how the discipline is the problem to blogging?

To you, kind reader, I want to say thank you, whether this is the first time you’ve clicked or you’ve been here for a decade — thank you for the encouragement and generous thumb-scrolling to make it to the end of the post.

This sounds like a goodbye speech.  This is Abby.com, signing off!

Pshhh.  As if I’d give up after ten years.

Tradition dictates that tin or aluminum are the ten-year gifts, but let’s not be bound by tradition.

Wink!

To read about the first days in Paris, click here.

~~~

For our third day in Paris, we went a little further afield to Versailles.  It’s a half hour train ride and quarter mile walk to the palace, and Uncle Rick told us to get there at the opening to avoid the lines.  Luckily, they now offer timed tickets so we picked 9AM and promptly passed the 200 person line to walk right in.

This isn’t even a quarter of the palace.  It’s staggering in size.  The early, cloudy morning hid the gleam of the gold, but not for long.

There’s a show on Netflix called “Escape to the Country” about British retirees buying modest country homes with thatched roofs.  This was Louis XIV’s escape to the country, away from his Paris palace, the Louvre; it was known as his little “chateau.”

So, same.

The interior is so unthinkably ornate, it’s actually difficult to grasp the grandeur.  If Les Misérables wasn’t convincing enough, one immediately understands why the French Revolution was entirely justified.

This is King Louis’ bedchamber.  Yawn indeed.

The thing about all the extravagance is it just puts you in the mood to enjoy some of your own.

Enter: high tea at Versailles.  At this point my parents were deeply, deeply craving enormous cups of coffee.  They like espresso, but they were starting to get desperate.  The kind waiter brought a porcelain carafe of French press (natch) that was clearly meant for two people, and my parents gave each other the side-eye like “…and where’s YOUR cup of coffee?”

It wasn’t twenty minutes before they ordered another.

Her giddiness made me laugh and laugh.

We walked the gardens, which are so expansive and myriad they offer golf carts to navigate them.  There are an astounding 300 fountains, a fraction of the original 1,500.

King Louis XIV (and his mistress), decided they needed an escape from their Versailles escape, so they built a mini version at the other end of the property.

We all have our needs.

The interior is like any decent retreat center.

During Louis XVI reign, Marie Antoinette sighed and said, “you all are too much for me.  I need peace, and quiet, and a staff of 40 to myself.”  She claimed the retreat from the retreat from the retreat: the mini-mini palace (called, inappropriately enough, the Petit Trianon).

She really turned down the volume on the décor to rustic, austere.

At this point Marie must have felt like the only thing missing from her life was a decent hobby.  But what?

Ah!  A tiny peasant-filled hamlet to call her own.  Finally we get our Escape to the Country thatched roofs.

She stocked it with farm animals, gardens, a pigeon coop, a dairy, and of course, peons to work it.  She dressed in a muslin frock and walked around pretending to be one of them, without the helpful contribution of any actual work.

And her hamlet hovel was the largest, of course, with a billiard room, library, dining hall and two living rooms.  Super typical of peasant life.

But remember!  It’s smaller than her mini-mini palace.  She was downsizing.

It was moments like this, in a place so remote and historic and singularly unique, that I would stop for a second and think of the clothes I wasn’t moving from the washer to the dryer, of the fights I wasn’t refereeing, and the naps I wasn’t managing, and I’d grin like an idiot and ask when our next snack was.

When you think about it, I owe Marie Antoinette for giving me an escape to the country.

The train ride back to Paris passed us from one world into another.  It’s a bizarre journey to depart Versailles, glamour capital of the world, travel through all the unremarkable towns around it, and end up in Paris, the City of Light.

We walked to one of the most charming streets in Paris, Rue Cler, a true market street with vendors selling every desirable food, wine, produce, meat and novelty one could want.

We had the sort of dinner I’d hoped to have in Paris, where we ordered freely, talked about my parents’ memories of their younger days, shared glasses of wine and laughed as the sun went down.

With a bottle of red in hand, we walked to the Eiffel Tower and sat on the lawn with all the other dreamers, waiting for the spectacular sparkle of the tower at the top of the hour.

We cheered and took photos as she lit up like Christmas, and laughed at the glory of it all, to be sitting outside on a cloudless night, together living a dream God had for us.

The walk to the base was incredible as the tower grew larger and loomed brighter.  We said goodbye and hopped in an Uber home, certain to sleep in the next day after the incredible one we’d just enjoyed.

After brunch the next day, we visited the Rodin Museum…you know, The Thinker.

Rodin is such a great place to visit because it’s housed in a mansion Rodin lived and worked in, it has fabulous gardens and grounds where some of his works are displayed, and it’s sculpture — we’d already seen many paintings, so this felt fresh.

This, and it can be done in an hour.

Our bigger goal that day was to visit the artsiest and most bohemian neighborhood in Paris, and also it’s highest, perched atop a hill: Monmarte.  We began by touring the Sacre Coeur cathedral at the tippity-top of Monmarte, and then the 900-year-old church next to it (!).

Off we trotted, me reading aloud from Uncle Rick as we navigated his walk through the highlights of the eclectic streets.

We had lunch in the town square, a plaza buzzing with artists called the Place du Tetre.

“HERE they are,” remarked my mom.  She had asked me half a dozen times where Paris was hiding all of her street artists.

We munched on crusty bread, ate hearty lunches, and watched as the fifty easels around us filled with cityscapes, portraits, still lifes, and abstract works of art.  We mourned not having any way of bringing a piece home, given our puritanical carry-on luggage situation.

Monmarte is its own enclave, bursting with personality and rich with the impressions left by Dali, Renoir, Van Gough and Picasso.

High behind that tree is one of two remaining wooden windmills of the 30 that used to dot the hill of Monmarte.  They were originally used to press monks’ grapes (1200s), grind grain (1600s), and crush gypsum rocks into plaster (1700s).  Around 1850, once the windmills were no longer in use, this windmill (moulin, in French) became the centerpiece of an outdoor dance hall (the same used in Renoir’s most famous painting, Bal du Moulin de la Galette).

The restaurant above, with the original windmill, is named for the painting and the galettes (crepes) people enjoyed at the dance hall.

We ended the afternoon with a walk down a classic Parisian market street, Rue de Martyrs, lined with traditional cheese mongers, butchers, bakers…didn’t see a candlestick maker.

America has settled on a paleo/keto life of carb-denial, but France doesn’t give a flying fig tarte.

After showers and a glass of wine on the balcony, we walked to dinner at Ile St Louis for our last night.

It was hard to say goodbye to such beauty.

Going all in on the French cuisine felt like a no-brainer, so we did timeless French onion soup, duck confit and crème brulee.

Though it felt like tossing a penny into a marble fountain my parents had built, I treated my parents to dinner for our last night.  It would be impossible to thank them sufficiently, not only for their generosity toward their middle daughter, but for giving me my childhood dream of being an only child, just for a week.  Of course I adore my sisters, but we middles yearn to bask in the coziness of singular attention.  My parents know it’s a trip I’ll treasure the rest of my days.

The next morning I boarded the plane with a happy heart.  People balked when I told them I was only traveling from Saturday to Thursday, but it was plenty of time.  Two of those were travel days, so we got four full days to explore.  Even with the time adjustment, we slept really well each night.  If anything, this trip sparked dreams for future trips with Mike, that maybe we can pop over to Europe without needing two weeks to do it.

I expected to dread the return, but instead I felt full, like God had refilled a cup I hadn’t drank from in years, and I was satisfied.

Mike did a fantastic job, twice having to get the kids to preschool at the eye-watering hour of 7:50AM, and even vacuuming the house from top to bottom.  Like any dad I’ve ever encountered, he called his sister and mine to pinch-hit dinner a couple of nights, and his mama took them all in for the weekend, but I am really proud of how well he did.  He even took them all to the dentist.  I mean, really.

Perhaps the sweetest gesture he gave me was what he didn’t do: he didn’t pee on the gift.  This is a thing in our marriage that means if one of us takes on the entirety of home life so the other can do something great, we act graciously (even if we’re gritting our teeth behind the scenes).  He never called to say, “I’m dying over here.  I hope you’re enjoying living the life.  WHEN are you coming HOME?”  Instead he said, “We’re great!  Live it up!  Love you, Momma!”

As the plane landed in Seattle from Manchester, I looked over to the woman across the aisle from me, who was journaling furiously.  We’d already spoken, so I knew she was British, but then I glanced down at her journal and saw in all caps, “I AM IN AMERICA!!!!” and then “THE TREES!!!” with little sketches of our evergreens filling the margins.  It warmed my soul that my unexotic return was her thrilling adventure.

After all, I’d already had my own.