One dog.
A squirrel family.
A few hundred backyard birds.
And one absolutely amazing husband.
Who was always looking out for me. Always picking up the slack. Always taking care of me when I got too busy taking care of everyone else.
“This really isn’t necessary,” I said when Perish finally pulled me down and set me inside our family SUV.
“It is,” he told me, closing the door then moving around the car.
When he turned the car over, the speakers immediately started blasting the most obnoxious song either of us had ever heard in our lives that the kids were currently obsessed with.
“Fuck no,” Perish said, switching over to our music that we almost never got to listen to.
“That feels nice,” I said as the air started to blast from the vents.
Perish had spent half the day in the water features with the kids, keeping him cool. I’d been mostly fussing about things in the heat.
“Kids were bragging about you to the Grassi kids,” Perish told me. “Saying that their mom was so cool because she set the party up.”
“Really?” I asked, feeling the damn tears immediately prick my eyes.
“Yep. Better soak it up now. Won’t be long before they think everything we do is embarrassing as fuck.”
That was true.
I’d been watching my cousins go through it with their tweens and teens for years. As much as I liked to think it wouldn’t happen to me, I also knew that I wasn’t anywhere near as cool as some of them, so if their kids thought they were cringe, mine would definitely think I was.
“You got a bit on the little one,” Perish said, sensing my thoughts and reaching over to squeeze my thigh.
I did.
We had two boys back-to-back. After that, I’d taken a nice little break because, well, pregnancy was not easy for me. I envied my cousins who thought it was the most magical experience of their lives. I’d been horribly sick for five months, then so swollen I could barely walk the last two months. So there were basically only a few weeks in the middle when it felt kind of nice.
We hadn’t been planning on a third baby but got a surprise after a weekend away from the kids.
My final pregnancy had been easier on me when it came to sickness and swelling but completely wrecked my skin.
Thankfully, everything went back to normal a few weeks after delivery, and we had our sweet little girl.
“And the boys know they gotta respect their mama,” Perish added.
They were already so much like Perish. Insanely tall for their ages, rough and tumble, and fiercely protective of their baby sister.
I was sure she would hate it when she was a teenager. But I loved it for her.
“God, this is weird,” I declared when we moved into our eerily silent house.
“Like a horror movie,” Perish agreed, accidentally kicking a toy truck that was in his path. It ricocheted off the coffee table and started to make siren sounds.
“That’s more like it,” I said, shooting him a smile over my shoulder. “I’m going to take a quick shower to wash the sweat and sunblock off.”
He was already cleaning up the disaster area that was the living room as I made my way into the bedroom.
The whole parenting thing was not as hard as society liked to claim when you had a partner who was actually a partner.
