this new baby

It's surreal in some ways to have a new baby in our family.

Caleb is one month shy of being four years younger than Ezekiel. Four years have galloped by since Ezekiel was born, and yet I feel like I have aged a decade in those four years. I am weary; life has been hard; I have not turned to the Lord often enough in my distress; I have carried burdens that were too heavy for me, burdens that I should have laid down long ago. My hair has rapidly turned gray in the last two years. I have so much missed having a baby, and yet our children have grown older and I have appreciated having them sleep through the night and buckle in their own carseats and all the rest of the benefits that come with having older children. I have missed having a baby and yet have somehow resigned myself to the long, long, long wait before having another child.

And then here he is!! This new baby, small enough to cuddle and caress and hold in my arms. His physical presence gently and continually defies my feeling that I am old and worn out. I am not; he is here; he is beautiful and perfect and so young and fresh, I can hardly believe it. He looks so much like our other babies, and somehow that has surprised me; unreasonable as it sounds, I think I somehow thought he would seem older, less fresh. But he’s new. All new and fresh and perfect, showing no signs of having an old, old, old mother. I wonder if that’s how the biblical Sarah felt when she had a baby? Of course, she really was old, but astonishment that somebody so new and young could come from her?

Everything is similar and familiar about him and yet everything feels different, too. I couldn’t handle it when our other babies cried, it made me cry too, and sent lightening bolts of adrenaline and compassion coursing through me. Now I think I’m handling it differently. It’s been a long time since we watched the Dustan Baby Method DVD that talks about the different cries that babies make (we watched it before we had Abraham) but he seems to have such a clear differentiation between cries. It’s not that his crying doesn’t bother me… I still can’t stand to let him cry in the carseat, so we aren’t going places really… but it seems more logical. If he sounds gassy, I’m able to calmly help him with that. If he needs to burp, I can tell that too. My emotions aren’t as wrapped up with his communication sounds as they have been with some of our other babies. Perhaps that is because Ezekiel cried so continually as a baby that Caleb’s crying seems so much more reasonable and so I can handle it that much better.

He makes soft little baby sounds with each breath while he is sleeping. Not all the time, but quite often. I think much more than happened with our other babies. And he is sleeping pretty well at night. I wrap him up and take him to bed and he nurses once or twice, I think, sometime in the night, and in the morning we wake up and we’ve both had a good amount of sleep. Often he has slept until 9:00 or later, and so I have too. I get up and sit with him for an hour or two and then finally feed my other children and myself and maybe get dressed, maybe not, and I keep holding him all day as the kids and I do homeschool (or not). The house has been a crazy disaster and I haven’t cared. One day last week I finally did load after load after load of laundry just to get it all clean, then left it all in nice heaps in everybody’s room. The house is just strewn with things and I really don’t care, I just sit in the living room and hold my baby all day.