The Adorable Ignorable Baby

It occurs to me that in the last post I made (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I was instructed to take pictures of whatever my husband/kids were doing at the moment. Weeks went by before I realized that I had listed the whereabouts of Logan, Amanda, Lily…and not Benson. This illustrates several facts: 1) I’m not 100% accustomed to my status as mother of three; 2) I am a somewhat-negligent mother of three, and 3) Benson is the world’s most content and low-maintenance baby. I sleep at night by telling myself that it’s mostly due to fact #3. Anyway, in an attempt to make up for the fact that I overlooked his very existence, I’m dedicating an entire entry to my adorable, ignorable baby boy. I hope I haven’t already given him a complex.

When Logan and I first decided it was time to start having kids, it took a lot longer than we expected to actually get a baby here. After a year of trying, we finally got pregnant – but I miscarried before the first trimester was over. It was nearly two years later that Amanda arrived. We concluded that we’d be lucky to get whatever kids we could, whenever we could. When Amanda was 15 months old, we were ecstatic to learn that we were expecting Lily. I should have made a mental note that it had taken us approximately half the time to get pregnant with Lily as it had taken to get pregnant with Amanda. Anyway, Lily was barely 8 months old when we discovered I was expecting again. We had fully intended to have more than two children, but our previous difficulty getting pregnant had forced us to consider the possibility that it might never happen. So when I say that Benson was a surprise, I don’t mean it in the sense that we didn’t want him. We DESPERATELY wanted him! The only thing that surprised us was how easy it was in comparison with the struggle we’d encountered before – and how obvious it was that somebody wanted that baby in our family NOW.

When I learned I was expecting a boy, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. I didn’t have any brothers myself, and the prospect of being responsible for the upbringing of someone who would one day head a family seemed a very daunting task (I don’t mean to imply that raising future mothers is less important; somehow that job didn’t – and doesn’t – seem as scary to me). Despite the imposing responsibility, I just can’t get over how much Benson just melts my heart! He really is just so incredibly sweet. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you have three kids in three years, the youngest is going to have to fight for attention – and

Benson doesn’t seem to be a fighter by nature, so sometimes we forget he’s there. : ) I’ll be interested to

see if he’ll eventually learn to be a squeakier wheel or if he’ll always be a passive little soul. At any rate, I just love, love, LOVE to snuggle him. I need to make more of an effort to set aside time for the two of us to have uninterrupted time together – thought the likelihood of it happening is pretty slim. We just got back from visiting my grandparents' house where Benson enjoyed an adoring public willing to lavish attention on him…and I even got a turn, too.