Empty and Overflowing

In three short days, my baby boy will be turning two years old.   I can hardly believe it.  I know that I’ve said that at each birthday with Wyatt but it’s a little easier to believe with him.  With Luke, it seems impossible on so many levels. 

When we were expecting Annabelle & even after we knew about her fragile heart, I gave away every baby boy item I had kept from having Wyatt.  It didn’t matter to me if she made it or not…honestly, that wasn’t even a thought.  In our hearts, she was here to stay.  We couldn’t bear to bring ourselves to think of our family without her.  She was going to be the only other baby we had.  I had what I wanted… one of each.  I so vividly remember sitting on the floor with my ever growing belly forbidding me from reaching all the way over as I dug through all the rubbermaid containers from the attic.  I gave away over five huge bags of sweet little boy clothes and kept only the very few outfits that I just couldn’t bear to part with…Easter mostly and some monogrammed things.   I was so at peace with blessing another family and their little boy with those things that had meant so much to us at a time.  I just knew I would never need them again.

Less than six months later, I was empty.  My arms were empty, my heart had a huge gaping void, and our family was only 3/4 full.

Even after Annabelle went Home, Scott and I thought we still didn’t want another baby.  For one, we had just faced and were living out our worst fear.  Scott couldn’t save me from that pain again and it hurt him that he couldn’t take it away and fix it.  We really only wanted her back and nothing could change the fact that regardless of how ever many babies we had, we would never have the one we wanted on this side of Heaven.

I can’t tell you exactly what it was that changed my mind.  Perhaps it was the many of you that I know prayed for us to be blessed with another baby.  Perhaps it was my aching arms.  Perhaps, and most definitely, it was just God’s Plan.

Luke isn’t like our first two babies.  God completely surprised us with them when we were totally not expecting it.  (Yes, friends, birth control fails!)  But, Luke is different.  We wanted him so badly.  We spent many nights on the sofa praying for God to please give us another baby to love.   We took test after test after test only to have them be negative for months in a row.  And, just when I was about to give up & go back on birth control to see if that would work out for us again ;), we found out we were expecting.  Just nine days before what would have been Annabelle’s first Christmas and the anniversary of my mother’s passing.

My arms were filled again.  Not how I had expected but so perfectly different.  My heart still has a void…it always will, but there is another part of my heart that is now overflowing for the precious third child I never had planned.  And, our family…I really don’t know how to explain it but to say that when we do our usual “family huggings” there is a spot in the middle that is painfully empty at the exact moment we are so joyfully overflowing.