We are adding a member to our family. In July. A little boy. It came as a shock. Not that we weren't trying. We planned for quite a while to have two kids. Since our first one is a girl, we really wanted a boy this time. And people were never short of advice on how to achieve that end. One of the more scientific-sounding advice had some voodoo involving ovulation timing so we got a few ovulation sticks and proceeded to get ready to rock on short notice.
Except the sticks always indicated that my wife was not ovulating.
At the same time, my wife was suffering from some kind of chest cold and she went to see her doctor. And as a precaution, they ran a quick pregnancy test before a chest x-ray. One guess what the result was. I guess when you're pregnant, you don't ovulate. Makes sense, I guess. Otherwise, you might queue up a litter of siblings...
I feel some trepidation, of course. Over these past two years, if you add up the hours of sleep I've lost, I'm pretty sure the sum handily exceeds two years. However impossible that actually is, that's exactly how I feel. It's as though you go through a lengthy, still on-going, rigorous and exhausting test of endurance, patience, fiscal discipline, and aforementioned sleep deprivation, and you decide to sign up for another, concurrent, more of the same. Oh the fecundity...
But we are ready. I expect everything will have a bit of comforting deja vu-ness to it. And we won't stress about certain things nearly as much as we did the first time around. I'm not naive, or blindly hopeful. I know it'll be difficult, perhaps in new and different ways than the first time around. But the big difference is now I know. I know. I know what the reward is. Every time my daughter runs to me, smiling, calling out "daddy!" in an excited way a child reserves for her father in these early, early years when her universe is small and you are the sun and the stars, I feel the weight of the world shedding from my shoulder and my universe, for that moment, shrinks to the same size as hers. And she is my sun, my stars.
That, I can stand to have hundred times over, no matter the cost.
