A letter to my little Rosebud

Dear Rosebud,

I want to welcome you to our wonderful little family and our boundless love. You have done more than just increase our family by one but you have expanded our hearts with love. I was so happy to hear that I was going to get a daughter and that everything looked and sounded so healthy that I was overflowing with excitement.

I am writing so that I can mark the beginning of your life within the pages of our family blog and history. This letter is also a pledge to you that I will love you with all my heart and soul, to protect you with all my might and to help guide you through all of life’s twists and turns. I know we will have lots of fun discovering the world together no matter how old you get.

You just turned two weeks old and already you twist me around your little finger. You are so pretty and cuddly that I cannot believe our luck in getting another perfect buddle of joy. Your brother was just as cute and healthy and I think you have copied your brother’s red hair, only time will tell if the hair stays that way. I will speak for our Sprout, that he really loves his little sister, even if he is confused about your specific purpose.

I want you to always remember that your Daddy will always love his little Rosebud. I look forward to seeing you grow up to be a strong and caring just like your Mommy.

Love you

Daddy

Pictures of a beautiful baby Rosebud

9 hours old, wide eyed and alert


Baby Rosebud and Mommy sharing a moment together


Time to go home, Rosebud is sporting a lovely hat knitted by her Mommy.


Big Brother Sprout hold his new little sister, Rosebud


Rosebud trying out her crib. Not sure about the crib.

It's not really about ice cream

Nothing makes my little heart go pitter patter like a good book. Finding a new (to me) author who gives me a compelling story with realistic characters in a setting I can vividly imagine—well, that’s what my friend Molly refers to as “chocolate orgasms under the Christmas tree.” I happen to have found just such an author in Susan Gregg Gilmore.
Gilmore’s first book, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, published by Shaye Areheart Books/Crown in 2008, is the story of Catherine Grace Cline, a teenager in rural Georgia in the 1970’s, who wants nothing so much as to escape her everybody-knows-everybody, small town life. The first half of the book is a series of snapshot events that explain Catherine Grace’s desire to leave her hometown, a rescue that she prays to God for every night. After the drowning death of her mother, Catherine Grace is raised by her Baptist preacher father, a man idolized by his congregation, which happens to be the entire town. Being both motherless and the preacher’s daughter places her in the limelight, when what she really wants is to fade into the shadows. We see Catherine Grace torn between trusting in and being angry with God, nurturing maternal bonds between herself and her sister, falling in unlikely love with the captain of the football team, and ultimately leaving them all behind to follow the dream that has sustained her throughout her life.
Once she does leave for Atlanta, the book becomes more narrative in structure, following the chain of events that bring Katherine Grace back to Ringgold and call into question everything she thought she knew about her family, her town, and herself.
Being hugely pregnant as I am, I’m finding reading something of a challenge these days. I can’t get comfortable, I fall asleep anytime I lie down anywhere - except of course in bed, and Reading for pleasure makes me feel guilt that I’m not slogging through yet another baby or parenting book. Honestly, it was the thought of ice cream more than anything that interested me in Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen. Turns out though, that the Dairy Queen is just where Katherine Grace does her ruminating on small town life and makes her plans for her escape from it. There are a fair amount of dilly bars in the book, but there’s hardly more than a scene or two that actually takes place at the Dairy Queen.
I get the majority of my reading material from the Braille and Audio Reading Download, BARD, website of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Gilmore’s first novel did such a fine job of captivating me in the face of unlikely odds that I’ll be purchasing the audio version of her next offering, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove.
I must confess here that I love books set in the South and written by Southern authors. Since I’m not one to pass up offering book recommendations, here are a few of my favorite Southern authors:

Pat Conroy: Honestly, the man needs no introduction. A Pat Conroy novel is what happens when heartbreakingly beautiful language falls into the hands of a master storyteller.
Jill Conner Browne: She writes the Sweet Potato Queen books, which are simply some of the funniest things I have ever read. Start at the beginning with The Sweet Potato Queen’s Book of Love if you want, but the Sweet Potato Queen’s Guide to Raising Children for Fun and Profit and the Marriage Planner Divorce Guide are my favorites. Oh, and all the books have recipes – yummy, Southern recipes – the kind you eat with a spoon straight from the pan and would never admit to even knowing about, let alone actually cooking yourownself.
Patti Callahan Henry: Her characters could be people you know from your own life, or even you. Her characters are realistically flawed without being tortured. My first introduction to Patti Callahan Henry was Driftwood Summer, and I followed that up with Losing the Moon. Both stories grabbed me and pulled me in from the very beginning.

Leave it to me to issue a summer reading list at the end of summer. So any other good book recommendations out there?

Familiar

I remember this feeling. I’ve been here before. A little over three years ago in fact. All the scrambling to get ready for the new baby is done. A stash of meals is in the freezer, the nursery is as put together as it’s going to get, the blankie is knitted, the bag is packed. The only thing left to do is wait. And worry. I think this particular anxiety comes with knowing exactly when the new baby will arrive. If I wasn’t having a scheduled C-section, I’d be waddling around moaning and complaining (not that I’m not still doing that), and feeling like this ordeal will never end. But I know it will end. It will end less than two days from now.
I am thrilled at the prospect of meeting my baby girl, even as I’m a little weepy that today will be the last day that it’ll be just me and Sprout at home, the way it’s been for three years. I’m glad that soon I won’t be pregnant anymore, but I’m anxious about that whole cutting me open thing. I’m in love with the idea of having two kids, even as I worry about how in the world I’ll care for both of them. I’ve said here before that “bittersweet” is a term that must have been coined by a mother. Every milestone, every event, is just that, bittersweet.
The first thing I’m doing once I have this baby is sending out for Starbuck’s. Well, Molly made me swear that the very first thing will be to text her some photos. Roger that. Sending out photos, then coffee. The coffee though, just the thought of it, that’s really the prize that’s getting me through this. Well sure, the darling baby too. As for right now, there’s a little boy with a stack of matchbox cars who wants my attention, and just now, I’m more than happy to give it to him.

Family Training

I realize I’m tempting fate here, but I think we’ve turned a corner on this potty training thing. At least where Sprout is concerned. Accidents are the exception rather than the rule these days. Now, if I could only train my husband.
No, not to use the potty. He does just fine with that. It was kind of a prerequisite for marriage for me. He even puts down both toilet seat and lid. Does it get more perfect? But all wives know that keeping a husband fit for indoor living is a constant battle of training and retraining. Admittedly, Michael faces unusual challenges, living with a blind woman as he does. For the most part, he has mastered the nuances. But sometimes, he forgets.
Michael was cleaning out the closet in the nursery. Well, that’s what he appeared to be doing until you went into our utility room. Then, you’d realize that he wasn’t so much cleaning out as just transferring junk from one room to another. That’s fine. I understand the need for a junk staging area. But the junk remained in the utility room. For days. And days. And eventually, inevitably, Sprout decided to investigate all this cool new junk. One of the items of junk was the potty chair that Sprout hated and wouldn’t use, but I, having paid $40 for the darned thing, refused to just toss it. It’s true, Sprout hated the potty chair. Note the past tense “hated.” Apparently, on this particular day, that potty chair looked just right for the peeing in. Let me interject here that I had no idea precisely what items of junk were in the utility room. I just knew it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to deal with, so I stepped cautiously around it on my way to and from the washer and dryer.
I heard Sprout talking about going pee pee. Thinking he was finally getting the hang of telling me he needed to go BEFORE going, I excitedly escorted him to our bathroom, the one he’s been using for weeks now. I helped him down with his pants and prepared to be amazed.
“But I don’t have any pee pee,” he said.
“But you said you needed to go pee pee.”
“I already did go pee pee.”
Say huh? “You did? Where?”
“In the living room, in the potty chair. Now can I pick out a present?”
I don’t know how to wean him from a present every time he pees, but that wasn’t my major concern at that time. Clearly, I had to scout out a puddle of pee. I looked in the usual places – down the hall, behind the recliner, in the corner. No pee. So there was nothing for it but to get down on hands and knees and search out this mystery pee puddle. Have I mentioned being nine months pregnant? So what I found was the never used (until now) potty chair, in the middle of the living room, facing the television. Again, there was nothing for it but to plunge right in. Yes, the bowl attachment was securely under the chair, and yes, the bowl was full of pee. Bless Sprout’s little heart, he had even gone for toilet paper to wipe up the splatters. So I emptied and washed the bowl, cleaned up the carpet splatters, then called my husband and let fly with the biggest, meanest fit a 9-months pregnant woman can muster up. I must say, it was an impressive tirade.
So to update, Sprout is doing great with the pottying, and Michael now knows the wrath of a very pregnant Kimberly. Let’s not have to repeat these lessons, ‘kay?