This evening I was lying next to my 2 year old trying to get her to to sleep. My head was buzzing with things I had to do, and my body was ready to spring back into action the moment she nodded off. I tried to think peaceful thoughts, tried to relax my breathing, so that my daughter would go to sleep quickly.

But she was wiggly, talking and flipping and flopping, as if she felt the breeze from my whirling brain. And so I lay there snuggling her and thinking about this coming month, wondering what it will hold for our family. For a moment I wanted to fast-forward a bit, to the place where I have all my loved ones together in one place, even our new daughters.

But then I realized something. My time with this current, familiar family is slipping away. We have less than a month with just us, less than a month until we welcome these new ones. Ones with their own habits and likes and dislikes and needs.

Undoubtedly some of their habits and desires and needs will jostle against with familiar established parts of the old ‘us’. There will be an unbalanced feeling, an eggshells/ strangers-in-the-house feeling for awhile as we settle into the new ‘us’, and learn the new way that our family will be. At those times, I’ll doubtless think longingly back to right now, this time when everyone was familiar and everyone knew the way we work, and there were no explanations necessary.

If someone asked if they could deliver the girls to me right now, this very minute, I would be waiting on the front porch holding the screen door wide, smile filling my face, arms outstretched to welcome our new precious ones.

And yet this bit right now, where everything is familiar, even the problems -- where the faces are as known as my own and the nuances of each person are so familiar that they make me chuckle (or groan) over the sheer predictability of them -- this bit is good.

I do long for our family to all be gathered together around one big table, each face present and accounted for. But that time is marching steadily my way, ready or not. In the midst of the looking forward, in the scurrying to prepare for the ones who come, I don’t want to miss this bit right now. Right now I will clutch the familiar around me like my favorite robe, secure in the ease of the ones I know, and enjoy these last days, these last moments of time with my family just as it is now.


More about the wait
Surviving The Wait (silly)
Surviving The Wait (really)