Sisters Mine

Little baby posts have been chasing around in my brains lately...funny little pureed carrot smeared ideas that have wee little fingers shoved up their noses. Not great ideas, but at least ideas.

I have this past weekend had a strange thing happen several times. More like this whole weekend has been spent on a low-dose mushroom trip and it sounds like I'm describing a cheap early 90's Sci-Fi movie montage whenever I try to put words on it. The kind of drippy "Special FX" thingy that involves spiraling backgrounds, rattling of the camera, and trippy "Woooowoo" music. You may think brain tumor... I think it is a thinning of the veil between this world and my memories of the pre-existence.

It may help you to know that I do not believe that my children sprang to being in my womb... that a spirit was created to fill each little body that is part Dadguy and part Mama. Nope, I believe that the spirits of the Chaos Girls have been for a very loooooong time. They are the Children Of God and I am their sister, and here in mortality I am their mother, nurturer, caretaker, teacher and upon occasion... zoo keeper, and official hoser-downer. I believe that we knew each other very well in the pre-mortal life... I think we were friends, the sort of friends that love each other very much but also love to play naughty little pranks on each other and then laugh about it hysterically. This explains why they know how to get my goat to the nth degree. But I digress...

I look at Birdie and what a busy yet contained unit she is... sometimes I look at her and she looks back with a calm and measuring gaze that is still unnerving in a four year old. It was down right creepy in a four MONTH old. She doesn't give away much when she is hurting, you only know when she breaks, but the whole world knows it when she is happy or excited. She is SO FREAKING SMART. I don't mean smart in a prodigy or savant sort of a way... although she can count to a hundred and has a good head for math. I mean she can carry a tune and REMEMBER a tune, it doesn't take her long to catch it and keep it. She has loved music since... well, before the day she was born.

When Birdie was born she had some fluid in her lungs... enough to put her in mild distress. She was doing this odd grunting noise and couldn't seem to fully catch her breath. Since she was doing mostly ok otherwise the nurses let me hold her for a few minutes before they whisked her away to the NICU. I think I was crying. I sang a little bit of The Wheels On The Bus and she stopped. She didn't stop breathing, she stopped grunting and I swear she listened. This observation has been born out over and over again as she has responded to song, my voice singing. She may be a Daddy's girl, but it has always been my song. There were times in her stormy and distressing infancy when my singing was the only comfort I could give to her. I can still turn her from anger or sorrow with a song.

I am absurdly proud and excited for her Preschool Program that is the wrap-up for the school year tomorrow morning. When I have looked at her this past weekend I have seen her baby-ness overlapping with her impending schoolgirl-ness... and then I swear to you I can see her as a woman. She is a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman... she is as difficult to read then as she is now, and just as brilliant.

LaLa and her warrior's heart, her fierceness and sweetness- she does NOT love it when I sing, and she never has. One of the very first words she learned was "NO!" and that was in conjunction with me singing. She has now graduated to "NO, MAMA YOU NOT THEENEEN!" From the very start I would try to sing her a lullaby and her screaming would somehow, defying all known physics, go up three decibels. She liked her swing... alot. She also liked car rides and her carseat... alot. For a while that's how I would get some rest at night. I would strap her little body in her carseat and hop on the freeway and drive the five minutes to the next town, turn around and come home... that would often earn me the following four hours of rest. She has always been very wary of Birdie and would scream loudly all four times that Birdie asked to hold her. Luckily Birdie was much like the Dadguy, and infants didn't even hit her radar until they were mobile.

LaLa has always loved hugging and kissing, cuddling and the like. Much of what Birdie has in her repertoire of lovin' is from watching and doing what LaLa did. LaLa was and is a mama's-girl, although as soon as she realized that Dadguy was the dispenser of otter pops and M & M's she has found much more use for him. She eats... maaaaaaan that little girl can eat. She eats weird things though... salsa on her eggs, sauerkraut and pickles. She prefers adult toothpaste to the bubblegum flavored stuff, and she has all the way back to her pre-walking days when she would call it "by-shee" for "spicy."

She is a passionate warrior, a fighter for truth. She will be heard. The first day of her life, I was alone with her in my hospital room and she looked me in the eye and began to talk. What she had was a message and I pray that someday when she has even more words than now that she will somehow remember the things she tried so desperately to tell me from day one.

...and my Pearl... my sweet girl. Content to be and bink, she is a drink of cold milk- healthy and sweet. Last night she took my face in her two chubby hands and smiled on me with such kindness and understanding. Ahhh, my heart, my heart! Face to face with such a friend as this, then she gurgled and started sucking on my chin.