11 Days?!

Holden,

I can't believe the spinning baby is saying it is 11 days until your due date. Wow. Just wow.

Well, the house is much more put together than even 3 days ago. All the boxes have been sorted and either unloaded and recycled, or placed in the attic for storage. The trash people give us a recycling can and we can put mixed media in there: paper, plastic, aluminum unsorted. This makes being "green" so much more convenient for your mums. Your nursery is sooooooo cute. There are just a few more tweaks to do and we will be done. But you could come anytime and I think be happy with your accommodations.

Daddy is painting the final touches on the kitchen right now. A few minutes ago he was standing on top of the kitchen counter, hunched over and painting the wall, and singing Bad Religion to his ipod. It's one of those things that you just cement to memory as a set of variables you will see once in your life.

Earlier I went to Target (I live there) and made Daddy a surprise relaxation bag. Candles, wine, Beethoven, jalapeno poppers (he loves them), and a gift certificate for an hour-long massage. I also gave him a thank you card thanking him for how hard he works for our family and stating the magnitude of appreciation I have for his integrity and dedication to our little corner of the world. We both got a little maudlin....but then he totally scared me.

"Come here, sit down, I have bad news."

When people do this to me my nature is to not want to sit at all and to take the bad news immediately at that moment while I am in a standing position. I was terrified someone in one of our families was hurt. Or that we were facing certain financial ruin. But mainly that someone had died. It was that sort of somberness. I sat down out of frustration because it seemed that sitting would speed up the process of hearing the news.

Turns out that a woman from the neighborhood had come around to collect donations from members of Riviera Springs (official name of our subdivision) because a woman down the street just lost her daughter. Her 10-year old was playing with a shovel she found and in tossing it up and waving it about had touched a power cord, and severed it. She was electrocuted and died. This happened yesterday. The woman (Chris has the impression that she is a single mother) is from Mexico and all she wants to do now is go home to Mexico to be with the rest of her family. Chris gave her $100, which is all we can really afford to give right now, and we are going to see if there is something else we might be able to organize in the neighborhood...maybe bringing food around to her.

Tragedies like this are always inspiring of ambivalence. I cried thinking of her and for the loss of an innocent child. Yet how in the world can I feel empathy for a situation that horrible? I hope I never have to and to pretend to even empathize with that level of despair seems so arrogant or self involved somehow.

Regardless, I can not help but think that we are 11 days until you burst in this world, innocent and vulnerable. Subject to all the chaos this world has to offer...with us trying to protect and shield you as best we can but ultimately having little control over the elements of danger implicit with just being alive. To hear of a loss of a child a few doors down from us a few days before our child is born into the world is nothing less of alarming, horrible, and almost maddening.

I love you, Holden. Life is a precious, temporary, beautiful, and tenuous beast. I promise you that we will do everything we can to protect you. But please please please be careful.

Mom

This is the astronomy picture of the day. To me it looks like baby footprints. Your feet in the sky ready to touch ground any moment: