This is our precious baby girl. She is a funny little thing 🙂 She likes black coffee, blue cheese, pepper jack cheese, jalapeno chips, hot sauce too hot for me to stand, beer, and lemons. We always joke that if her daddy likes it, she will. He likes strong and peculiar flavored foods and so does she. She actually prefers to sip the black coffee from her daddy’s mug instead of my cream and sugar with a little coffee. She loves Doc Mcstuffins and Daniel Tiger and sings the tunes to the cartoons while she plays and walks around the house. She thinks anything that is pink in the house is hers. Doesn’t matter if it is a pink bow or a pink pen lid….it’s her “pink”. She wants to sleep with her kitty cat back pack on but settles reluctantly for us setting it beside her crib so she can have it back in the morning when she wakes up. She loves our pets just as any 2 yr old does and loves to give them her sweet baby kisses. She is so funny when the puppy chews on something she thinks that she shouldn’t. The puppy could have a piece of paper and baby girl squeals, “Oh no! Oh no! Bella chew!” and she won’t stop until we get it from her. She is everyone’s baby girl because we all love her and dote over her…right down to Max, her 3 yr old brother. She is super loved and it is wonderful 🙂
She is the baby of the family and will remain that way and she was also our biggest “surprise”. She was meant to be but the only one who wasn’t really planned or expected. Let me explain a bit here. When my husband and I got married, we knew we wanted a large family. We joked about having 6 kids but then we were young and naive as to how much it took to raise a large family. After all, we were just over 20 yrs old. After a couple of years of marriage, we had our first baby. He was planned. We were so in love with him, it was hard for us to imagine another child as much as we did him! We still knew we wanted more children though and hoped our hearts would grow with love for another. Just before he turned 2, we found out we were pregnant with our 2nd baby. We were ecstatic as we had been planning on her. Just as we had hoped, when she was born, we loved her every bit as much as we did our first. For a while, we debated, “should we have more or stop at 2?”. Seemed like a logical question as we knew at the time we wanted an even amount of children. If we had one more than we would have to have another to even that out. We felt content with 2 and we had one girl and one boy and they seemed to love each other. Well shortly after her first birthday, our decision was made for us. We found out we were pregnant with our 3rd. We knew it was a possibility as I had been having trouble with the hormonal forms of birth control and honestly, we were leaning more towards the “let’s have more” side since we found so much joy in the 2 we had so if it happened it happened and we would be happy. We were happy to be bringing another sweet baby into our family. We weren’t worried anymore that we wouldn’t be able to love another the way we loved the others because we knew now that we would and of course we did! Transitioning from 2 to 3 was much more difficult for us than transitioning from 1 to 2 but after about a year and a half, we felt we had finally transitioned well 🙂 We waited a bit longer and started thinking about adding our 4th and decidedly last baby. We became pregnant and in the fall, we welcomed what we thought was our last baby into our family. Things were looking good and we couldn’t be more happier until…….
A week after our last son was born, my husband went back to work, only to find he had been layed off from his job. It was devastating. I couldn’t work as I had just delivered. The next several months were probably the hardest our family had experienced. I went back to work as soon as I could picking up hours where I could. Meanwhile, my husband was on the hunt for a new job….any job really but was unsuccessful. He experienced difficulties due to lack of years of experience and expertise as well as being over qualified as he had 2 college degrees. Jobs that he qualified for because of his degrees wanted more experience than he had, which was very frustrating. Times were more stressful than ever but we stuck through it. Shortly after Max was 6 months, we were floored when we found out we were pregnant yet again. How did this happen? A stupid question it might seem to most people but honestly, we had done everything in the book to prevent it aside from one of us being “fixed” and let’s be honest here…..life with 4 young children leaves little time and energy for those kinds of “adult activities”. It brings tears to my eyes to think of how I felt when we found this out. I was the sole provider and my husband was trying everything he could to find a new job, putting in application after application to no avail. I didn’t think I had it in me and what would we do if he was still unemployed by the time this baby was born? How could we tell our friends and family? My coworkers would eventually find out too and they knew the difficulties we were already experiencing. How could I face the world? Not that it was really anybody’s business but people have opinions and aren’t afraid to tell you and people talk. I felt so alone and helpless. We had our hands full as it was with our 4 already and how could we safely and patiently care for another baby and keep the others happy as well? After a couple of weeks came to the reality that we would make it and be ok. We always work tough times out and we would this time too. Needless to say, the next few months were very stressful, although we had finally become very excited to bring this precious joy into our family, despite the comments and reactions of others. As her arrival was nearing, we became more stressed as my husband was still unable to find a job. It wasn’t until a few days before she was born that things started to change. He was suddenly thrown 3 jobs! It meant he would have to start the day the baby girl and I were brought home from the hospital but hey….you do what you gotta do right?! Times were still tough for since he was gone so much of the time and I was left alone with 5 young children under the age of 8 most of the time but at least we could financially support our family now 🙂 Who am I kidding? Times are still tough but we make it 🙂
I am tearful as I write this because even though Ansley (baby girl) was certainly not planned, in fact she was very much unplanned, we are so thankful for her everyday. She has completed our family in so many ways and we all couldn’t imagine life without her. In case you are wondering if we plan on evening out the numbers with that 6th baby, the answer is no 🙂 Now that would be another HUGE surprise if that happened as it should be impossible at this point 😉
Thanks for reading and allowing me to share a personal story with you!
Nurturing Insanity 