Eight months ago, Darby was born and forever changed the course of our lives.  Eight months ago, we felt love we didn’t know existed.  Our old and little grinch hearts grew infinite sizes in order to hold the love that is bigger than we realized it could ever be.

Eight months ago, we began talking about poop every single day of our lives.  We chose to no longer have a start or end to our days.  We choose to indenture ourselves to the smallest being in our home, and to ensure her needs rise above all others.  We gave up our naps, eating sitting down, and weekends filled with rest, and in return we realize the love we feel for each other is different and in some ways dwarfed by the love we have for this tiny human.

As parents, Darby, we choose to ensure your opinions matter, and that you have choices.  We commit to teaching you how to think, not what to think. We promise to give you a good listening to, more often than we give you a good talking to.  We will show you that you are unique so that you won’t feel pressure to be like everyone else.  And (in order to show that we are still realistic about how challenging things will be during the weeks and years that follow) we will probably yell at you not to touch your poop, or grab the cats’ tails too hard, or to turn off the Baby Shark song.

Young lady, you deserve all of the gentle, wonderful happiness that life can bring your way.  If life goes as it should, your Baba and Mom will be around until you are grown and capable of navigating life on your own. In the meantime, we are committed to giving you the greatest gift we can – a sibling.  Several weeks ago, we became a waiting family to welcome home our youngest, and to complete our family.

Laura used to hate it when I called Darby “Humphrey” before she was born, but we grew tired of saying “the baby” before we knew we were having a girl. This time around, we again aren’t sure of gender, and we still call Darby “the baby” sometimes.  So in order to talk about completing our family with another baby and to know which kid we’re talking about, we are using another fake name. We call the new baby T.O.B.Y. TOBY stands for “The Other Baby”, so now we talk all the time about Darby and TOBY.  Now we spend our days talking about “if TOBY is born by then”, as we’re anticipating another little angel joining our lives.  So far, this wait has been so very different from the last one.  We are not anxious…the fear of the unknown is gone.  We are so busy and happy with our wonderful daughter, and we know the best and worst of the process for which we’ve signed up.  We look forward to meeting our youngest, and in the meantime we talk to him/her every day, and say the same things we used to say to Darby before she was born.  “Get big, be strong, and speak up for what you need.”  We can’t wait to meet you, TOBY.

#comehometoby