Quentin always wants to be where his sister is. He adores her. When I’m nursing her in the morning, he will come tiptoe into her room and say “Hi Autumn!” in a quiet singsong voice. Most of the time, she will look directly back at him and give him the biggest smile.

This week I said “Can you believe she is five months old? Does it feel like she has been here forever? Or can you remember when it was just you and Theo?” He thought about it and then said slowly “Well… but when it was me and Theo…. I always wanted… a baby sister.” It made me smile, in both a happy and sad sort of way.

I have been working on moving some of my writing into a book that I can print for at home; something tangible. Later, the same day that I had this discussion with Quentin, I was working on content from June of 2015. I don’t think I have read it since I wrote it. We were in Hawaii, and I “spilled the beans” to my family that we were having a baby girl. I was about 11 weeks pregnant at the time. Looking back, I am marveling at how little I wrote in the summer of that year, compared to my usual volume. I was horribly sick with pregnancy nausea, that lasted beyond the first trimester, but I was uneasy. I knew, I knew somehow, in my gut, that something was wrong. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t articulate it, because there was nothing to say other than “a feeling.”

Nelle would be two. That baby sister Quentin wanted would be a toddler. She was due on January 12th. Or the 14th, depending on which doctor’s estimation I use, but since the 14th is our wedding anniversary, it is hard for me to think of that day as my due date, so we’ll go with the 12th. She would be two years old.

Instead of a toddler, it is a 5-month-old baby, and aren’t those the most paradoxical words… “instead of”….