When I first thought of pulling out the iPad and writing some commemoration of the date here, it was 1:15 am in a motel room in Sturbridge, Mass, Gus was snoring and curled up next to me in one bed, Jamie and Wyatt were sleeping in the other bed, and I couldn't sleep at all. I was struck by the fact that five years to the day I had been snuggled up with Wyatt on our friends Tess and Doug's couch, trying to get some sleep while Jamie lay in a hospital bed, recovering from her emergency C-section. and Gus lay in the NICU in an unknown condition. Parenthood is a great journey into the unknown (I'm sure my parents have felt that in all too real a way over the past couple of years with me). We'll never know for sure what was happening to Gus in the few hours before he was born. Unfortunately, that has always placed a cloud of worry over him for us. At 3 and 4, his speech was a little delayed, and we never knew whether that was related to deprivation of oxygen. Happily, we can't get him to stop talking now. In fact, he usually wants, "toys with faces," so he can make them talk to each other. He's enjoying pre-school and will start kindergarten next fall; he continues to get physical and speech therapy but shows no other deficits than a slight lack of focus. He's a usually-jolly, at-times-stubborn, myopic oddball, who has helped hold our family together in the face of considerable challenges. This is the face of that oddball:
