So twice this week I’ve had people comment on the number of kids I have. All these years I’ve never heard anything other than the occasional “wow, you have your hands full,” but 4 has certainly been the magic number for attracting attention.
At First Awakenings I was waiting for Bob outside the bathroom and this woman came up to me and said, “My friend and I were commenting that you deserve a medal. We couldn’t believe you have 4 kids!” Um, OK. That is a nice-ish comment. But a medal? It’s not like I was fending off an attack of a pride of lions or something equally ferocious. I was just sitting at a table with my 4 children who were happily (and quietly) eating their raspberry/coconut/granola pancakes.
Then at Target today we were leaving the checkout with our cart at the same time as another woman and she says, “Go ahead, you have your hands full.” OK, fine. I’ve heard that one before. So as we pass her I hear her counting, “1, 2, 3, 4 . . . my Lord!” I think it’s funny that 4 attracts attention because 1) coming from a family of 4 kids, it seems perfectly normal and doesn’t feel like an an extraordinary number of humans in one family and 2) in the military I’m surrounded by breeders so 4 is only 1 more than the “norm” of 3 and enough people do 4 that it doesn’t stand out.
Well, I’m certainly thankful to my Lord that I do have all 4 of my children. Cause if we only had 3 I would miss out on this sweet face:
or this one:
or this one:
Heck, I was happy with just this one:
but then I would have missed out on moments like this one:
Thankfully we decided that we owed it to #1 to give him some brothers. And who knows, maybe this newest one one will eventually get a little sister. We could go for “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . oh my!”