I shudder to think what the third pregnancy will be like, now that it’s not just one child in the house while I grow another.
Wilder leans in to kiss me once more, and then he’s lumbering off the bench, opening the rolling cooler we brought with us, full of food for tonight.
He talks to me as he sets it all out on the table, pitching me on new dishes he’s been experimenting with. I wonder if he knows by now I’d let him put anything he wants on the menu? He sure acts like he thinks he has to sell me on every single one. Like he isn’t as much the owner as I am, and our success hasn’t been so explosive because of his culinary wizardry.
But I listen along, arguing back where I’m supposed to, giving him a chance to feel like he’s earned it, so the approval is that much sweeter for him.
My gaze bounces between them all: Wilder, setting out the food he prepared for tonight, Blaise, ramming his toy truck into the fort they built to knock it down, and Poppy, still drawing with Ella not one hundred feet away.
It’s hard to believe I got so lucky. For so long, I didn’t know this kind of joy was possible.
But my heart expands further when I see who is coming across the lawn now. Rory, carrying another child. There’s nothing peaceful about this one. The closer they get to us, the more the kid wriggles and kicks, clearly impatient.
When they’re on the other side of the ground that was cleared for the play spot, Rory leans down and sets the girl down.
Immediately, she starts running for our table. “Mommy!” she screams, heading for us. Holding my arms out for her, I smile, letting her run to me.
Except, wild child that she is, she trips on the uneven ground and topples down. Instantly, howling cries that peel at my insides start. I’m already up off the bench, but Wilder is halfway to her before I’m standing, those long legs of his giving him a hell of a cheat.
Axle has also dropped the dump truck he was playing with and has started for his cousin as well. “It’s okay Sage,” he tells her, where she’s in her dad’s massive arms, as he crouches down next to her.
Sage rubs an eye and looks at her cousin when he gets close to them. Axle hands over a toy, and Sage immediately plops down into the dirt and plays with it. Tears dry, the event over.
While Sage might be the same size as Poppy, the same age, and okay, they share every feature as identical twins, in personalities? They couldn’t be more different.
Where Poppy is softer, quieter, more angelic, Sage has a different approach to life. She runs straight for it, even if she fallsdown time after time. Poppy gives us peace, and Sage teaches us patience. It’s about balance, really.
We didn’t sign up for twins, but I wouldn’t trade my family for anything in the world.
When I get to Wilder, standing guard over Sage to make sure the ground doesn’t hurt his precious daughter again, he wraps an arm around me and kisses my head.
Rory, however, has blades in her eyes. “That was by far the nastiest diaper I have ever changed in my life, Alexis.” Somehow she makes every syllable in my name sound like a curse word, but it isn’t with any heat behind it.
I shrug at her from under my husband’s arm. “We have to change three times as many as you guys ever did. Besides, it’s good to keep you grounded.”
She shakes her head slowly. “That was payback, wasn’t it?”
For a flash, a memory surfaces. Of me and baby Ella, a nuclear diaper when I had no kids of my own. A vow of payback was mentioned. I manage to hold back my laugh. “I can’t control what’s in those diapers, you know that.”
“I’m not offering again for the rest of the night,” Rory insists, walking toward her daughter who outgrew stinky diapers years ago.
My first thought is that she’s lucky, but then I pick up Sage and I want this phase to last forever. Stinky diapers and all.
“Food’s ready,” Wilder reminds everyone, and the adults start to make their way to the table.
“Where are they?” Rory asks, looking to the woods bordering the clearing.
“They left right after you took Sage,” I tell her. “Montana needed a change of clothes, but she only wanted mommy.”
“Of course,” Rory says, nodding, because that’s the stage Montana has been in the past month.
“But Weston went with her,” I start, and Rory finishes that sentence for me with a knowing look.
“Because he’s Weston and his wife is seven months pregnant and he won’t leave her side in case she needs him.”
“Exactly.”
Rustling noises from the woods behind us get louder, and as if they were summoned, come the three Gradys. Amelia, nearly waddling from how huge she is with her third pregnancy, Montana leading her by one finger through the pathway, and Weston bringing up the rear, ready to catch any slips or trips from either of his girls.
