For roughly the first year of our marriage, at random points one of us would turn to the other and say, with more than a trace of disbelief, "We're married." To some extent our good fortune at having found such a wonderful mate hadn't fully registered. As implied in my last post on Emelia, at present we seem to be undergoing a similar experience -- in fact, we turn to each other now and again and exclaim, "We're parents," with the same element of disbelief that we shared seven years ago. With our difficulties in getting pregnant, and then staying pregnant, the very notion that we would become parents took quite some time to take root, though we ventured a thought now and again after we saw the heartbeat for the first time. Only in the third trimester did Kathy begin to accept that it really was going to happen this time. And now, with an eight-day-old in tow, we're still coming to grips with our new reality.Reality, however, has a way of making itself felt, regardless of one's acceptance of it. It does so in gentle ways, such as when the eight pounds of Emelia are sleeping on one of us. And it does so in rougher ways, such as at 2:30 this morning, when Kathy's changing of Emelia on our bed was interrupted by a large flow of pee that displayed no desire to stay on the portable changing pad on which Emelia writhed. But regardless of the particular method by which the reality that is Emelia injects itself into our lives, it does so inexorably, one incident at a time, leaving us with less and less doubt that once again we have been visited by good fortune.
