A decade of marriage is a pretty big deal.

I tried to write something special a hundred times, but it all comes down to this: He changed my life. Quietly and extraordinarily. And all of this, everything we’ve worked for individually and created together, is quietly extraordinary too.

Here’s to ten amazing years.

vows: May 4, 2002

just married

our first house, August 2003 (currently for sale! BUY ME! PLEEEEASE!)

celebrating George’s official permanent U.S. residency! (green card) April 2004

Hungary trip, May 2005

Oliver’s birth day, July 18, 2006

5 year anniversary, May 2007

George’s law school commencement, May 2008

our 30th birthdays (1 week apart), October 2008

our growing family, Christmas 2009 (Andrew – 7 weeks old)

us, May 2010

the four of us, October 2011

baby boy #3 – due June 30, 2012

the words engraved in our wedding rings: faithful hearts

I love you, George, and I can’t wait to see what adventures the next ten years bring.

I’m a little late on catching up… things are still hectic around here! Briefly: the house is still on the market, baby #3 is still baking, Oliver developed a bad wheezing cough that led to an aerosol treatment at the doctor’s office and an inhaler for a week, and today Andrew had a fever. It’s getting hard to keep up with everything; I may be spreading myself too thin but I can’t quit now. There is a yellow Post-it square taped on my parents’ computer desk, written in my mother’s angled cursive, that says, “If God leads you to it, He will lead you through it.” So through it I go.

Easter was bittersweet—our first holiday without my mom. As a distraction, my dad, my sisters, my brother, and one of my aunts (my dad’s youngest sister) went crazy on spoiling Oliver and Andrew. So they each received FIVE BIG BASKETS, mostly full of things like cars and outside toys (since everyone knows I’m anti-candy, lol) but also some chocolate, plus some bigger items from my dad. My oldest sister, who hosted us all at her house, even put together an egg hunt for them. They loved it! And it helped the rest of us, too. There is nothing so true to my mom’s memory as watching her grandsons’ little faces light up with excitement. I am grateful that everyone made it a special day for them as a way of carrying on her love.

While George and my dad took the boys outside to run off some of their candy energy, the rest of us sat down to watch a dvd created from old movie film clips taken by my grandpa. It’s amazing to have these images of our family so many years later, to see our grandparents and parents so much younger than we remember them! First was footage of the Queen Elizabeth ship: my great-grandmother, who lived in England until she married, took the whole family to England with her one year. (I believe it was 1969. Unfortunately my mom missed out on that trip because my sister Jennifer was only about 6 months old.) The recorded clips went backwards through time, with my sister Jennifer as a baby, then my oldest sister Debbie. There was no sound on the old film so we all filled in with comments and stories and laughs.

Then suddenly the film cut to my mother walking down the aisle at her wedding, and we all went silent.

She was nineteen years old when she married her first husband (my sisters’ dad)… so beautiful and young and happy. It’s hard to reconcile that day with the present. They cut their wedding cake, blissfully ignorant that one day she would wash his work clothes and, by statistically unbelievable bad luck, a toxic fiber inhaled during that everyday act would later cut her life short with a rare and horrible disease. But on their wedding day, she was perfectly healthy. It was still possible at THAT moment for her to be alive in THIS moment… and yet it wasn’t. We watched quietly, greedy for every detail of that beloved face.

“She’s always smiling and laughing,” my sister observed gently. “All the time. Smiling and laughing.”

Her dark curly hair painstakingly straightened according to the style of the mid- to late 1960′s, my mother’s eyes crinkled shut with laughter and then she turned shyly away from the camera, still smiling, and at that moment I suddenly saw MY resemblance to her for the first time. My appearance and my personality are almost entirely like my father’s; but that most sparkling and sincere emotion, happiness, looks on me just like it did on her. If that is the only trait I inherited from her, it was the best. And now it’s Oliver’s as well.

Watching those films didn’t make us miss her any less. Everyone wiped away tears. Mom should still be here, we were all thinking. It’s not fair. I want her back.

But seeing her was also a reminder to be happy. That’s how we remember her, and that’s how we keep her with us.

And through it we continue to go.

28 weeks, and feeling it:

Also 30 lb up. That’s less than at this point last time, but still. Oy.

Maybe the extreme stress and busyness of the past few months (or really, the past YEAR) finally caught up with me, but I’m suddenly exhausted this week. I find myself craving naps again, or even just some Quiet Time, which is pretty much impossible with two little boys running around. Somehow I need to find stored reserves of energy because the house is still on the market and it’s only going to get harder to keep up.

Most days I’ve taken Andrew for a 1-1.25 mile walk in his stroller while Oliver is at school in the morning, but now I can only walk about half a mile at a time due to increasing Braxton Hicks contractions. I had exercise-induced Braxton Hicks in both of my previous pregnancies, too, but these are more frequent and STRONGER. Even drinking water before/during/after the walks does not help. My doctor said it is normal to feel them more intensely for each subsequent pregnancy, but since I have more than 4-5 per hour when exercising (um, try 4-5 per 10 minutes!), she recommended that I break up my long walk into several short walks from now until at least 37 weeks.

My 32-week appointment will take us into the first week of May, so by then, we’ll need to discuss tentative labor and delivery plans—my favorite part of this whole pregnancy thing, because then it’s OVER! And while I’d love for my doctor to deliver baby #3, we’re still praying we get an offer on the house before then. I even broke down and ordered a St. Joseph statue to bury in the yard. The eco-friendly kind, no less, because being nice to the environment = Good Karma points, right? At this point I feel no shame about sucking up in every way I can! heh.

Sometimes I feel bad that we’re welcoming this baby into such chaos, but in a way, he is what ties all the pieces together. He existed before the For Sale sign in the yard and before my mother died; he is my connection between what I had then and what I hope for in the future. And when I finally hold him, the five of us will bridge the old life and the new, together.

Only twelve weeks to go. Maybe slightly less. I keep joking with George that it will be June 26, because it’s a Tuesday, and the other two were both born on Tuesdays. Any guesses??

One of my favorite childhood books is Anne of Green Gables. The story begins with a middle-aged pair of siblings, Matthew and Marilla, who decide to adopt a boy to help with farm work. The orphanage erroneously sends a girl (Anne), but she wins their hearts and they let her stay. Matthew later calls it a lucky mistake; Marilla responds, “It wasn’t luck, it was Providence. He knew we needed her.”

That’s exactly the way I feel about my boys.

Many people—mainly women, to be honest—assume that we’re having a third child because we didn’t get a girl last time and that we must be disappointed. “Wow, three BOYS,” they say with a mix of pity and terror. “You’ll certainly have your hands full!” As if three children of the all-girl or mixed-gender combinations would be easier. Then they say with a wink, “I guess you’ll just have to try again for a girl!” because apparently I should not feel complete as a mother of only boys. Apparently having sons is less desirable overall, especially because boy clothing isn’t as cute.

As a woman, I am expected to want the dresses and pigtails and special bond that come with having a daughter. I understand where that feeling comes from: at the beginning of my second pregnancy, I expressed my (guilty) hope for a girl. But my baby’s gender no longer mattered after I lost that pregnancy—even less so after a second loss, and later, a third. I still think it’s totally okay for others to wish for a child of a certain gender for themselves; I just get upset when they assume everyone else shares those same wishes, or when they project their own hypothetical disappointment onto others. My journey as a mother has been different, and I don’t need the color pink to remind me that I’m lucky I get to do this at all.

Having “three of a kind” is not quite as common as people think. In a study of over 6,000 families in the U.S., 73% of the three-children families had children of both genders, 14.9% had three boys, and 12.1% had three girls. So having three boys is actually pretty special. Maybe it’s not everyone’s idea of the “perfect family,” but that’s okay. It’s our perfect family, dirt and noise and tutu-less-ness and all. We share the same joys and frustrations of any parents, the same bittersweet pride of watching our children grow up. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. What’s truly exceptional is our mother-and-Oliver bond, our mother-and-Andrew bond. My life is full of love. And I’m sure my being sent three boys is no mistake.

He knew we needed them.

You never think you’ll miss something like a dish rack until you have to put it away for a long time.

Our house has been on the market for five and a half weeks. We’ve had two open houses and nine other showings. Every time we leave, I tell myself hopefully Maybe this will be it! because I can’t think about doing this over and over again.

It’s odd knowing that strangers are walking through your house. Your bedroom where you sleep. Your bathroom where you shower. Your children’s rooms, full of memories. And the strangers judge your spaces without knowing you at all, without seeing your life as it is lived but only the walls that you freshly painted and emptied of family photos and the floor you steamed meticulously free of juice drips and watercolor paint splotches. You keep checking your phone the next couple days, willing an offer to follow. Another showing is scheduled. Repeat cleaning. Keep waiting.

Our home is fairly simple. We took very good care of the house and yard but haven’t spent extra money on fancy updates because we haven’t had it yet, aside from replacing things that needed replaced, such as the deck and the roof and all but one of the six major appliances. But there are many other things we wanted to change which now seem magnified when we look through the eyes of potential buyers. The old kitchen counter. The cement basement floor. And there are things we can’t change. There is only one full bathroom and one half bathroom. The master bedroom closet isn’t modernly huge. A lot of people might walk through, seeing these flaws and nothing else.

But if we’re lucky, another couple or small family will see more, because we can’t take ourselves out of the house completely. All the investments we made while we lived here are not things we installed or updated. There is love in every room. In good weather there are chalk drawings on the driveway. The right people will be willing to accept or replace the flaws in exchange for the sunny glow on the kitchen table by the windows or the fun of entertaining on the deck. They will sense that there is unseen potential here, that the house has been filled with happy lives, and they will be ready to start their own where we leave off.

Hopefully soon.

I miss my dish rack.