Banana Duck

My daughter's toy camera has this feature when you can put silly graphics on photos. So she took a picture of some bananas on our counter, affixed a duck beak, then tweaked the coloring in IPhoto and came up with Pop Art - she made it all by herself. She's six years old! It's stuff like that that makes me smile big as a banana duck. I can't get over how awesome this is. I know I'm her mom, so I'm probably overzealous, but look at the composition! The humor! The artistry! Okay, moving on from Banana Duck.

One of my first posts, and the one that I've heard the most feedback about, dealt with our family's attempt to get pregnant... the difficulty we had and the struggle we went through to come to acceptance about what our family looks like. Since I wrote that post, I have heard amazing stories. Moms and dads at school give me hugs and tell me their stories. One of Sadie's best friend's dads shared with me the other day that it took 15 years for them to get pregnant. Fifteen years! Now they have two little girls. It took my grandparents nine years to get pregnant with my dad, back in the 1920s-30s, before there were fertility options, before rampant adoption from China. When I told that to my ob/gyn, the first time we were trying, she said, "Nine years and they were still having sex?" To which I replied, "Well, they didn't have kids."

The stories are wonderful, heartbreaking, inspiring. And now, I sit here distracted from the "comedy pass" I have to do on a kids' show my husband and I are writing, from editing the novel I put in a drawer for seven years and have finally pulled out, from applying for grants so our sweet little charter school doesn't go under... I'm distracted because one of my best friends finally had a baby and he's in intensive care after being born with severe lung issues. I'm now gathering stories about survival. A mutual friend - total strong mountain man - told me he was born premature, in NIC-U for two months while his lungs developed. Another friend tells me that her daughter was born with the cord around her neck and wasn't breathing for her first moments. Now she's a healthy, bright first grader. These are the stories I'm collecting today. When you put together the fertility struggles and the pregnancy complications and the crazy birth stories...it feels like a miracle that any of us are even here.