The missing child

Five and counting...

I have that nagging feeling again. The one that hits after I count the brood--even after all five are mentally counted--it's a heart stopping feeling, for just an instant, that someone is missing. All parents know it in its usual form, where there's a face immediately attached to it on the heels of a burst of panic. Like when a child isn't brushing her teeth in the bathroom with the rest of them, and I know instantly who hasn't been accounted for--Sissy!--and soon discover her already asleep, one shoe on and one shoe off, on top of her covers.

This missing child feeling is the feeling that hits, facelessly and namelessly when all the children are safely tallied--someone isn't here. It's someone I don't know yet. Some families experience this anonymous feeling of missing a child as an invitation to have another one. For us? It's likely an invitation to begin fostering again. Our house is very close to being ready for us to accept another blessing, but not quite yet. We have a few more details to take care of in the renovations.

My heart is already ready. I miss this person. My arms are ready to receive her in her first hug, or him, or them. Every time I count to five, when we load up in the van, when we start a meal, when I kiss heads at night, I miss this person I haven't met. Where are you, honey? I'm here.

My husband has been feeling it, too. The other day, at dinner, I saw his eyes sweep the table in a mental count, before his eyes met mine.

"Missing baby," he said.
"Yeah, me, too," I answered. 
We both smiled, then I sighed, and he squeezed my hand.

Only the two of us would understand what we mean, that we are both experiencing that invitation to make ready for the next child. My husband is working on the renovations, and I'm working on patience. Even my youngest, upon finding that the baby potty she'd recently graduated from was missing from the bathroom this morning, remarked mournfully, "We need another baby, mommy!"

I know that feeling.

...room for more...

A year later and we're almost done with the Ugly Yellow Trailer!

We bought another house and it cost even less than the trailer did. Of course, it will cost us more by the time we move it onto our place, but right now it's at about $1.15 a square foot. Yes, that's a decimal there. That's one dollar and fifteen cents for those of you who skim.

Soon we will be tripling our square footage. This is a cause for rejoicing not merely for the fact that we will be able to take a step in any given direction without having to say "excuse me" first, but mainly because we will have room for more children. We've been wanting to foster another baby since our youngest was weaned, but couldn't until we had more space. There's regulations about that. Wise ones.

In case you are curious, my husband and I would love for our family to be larger and are taking these steps to make it possible. We've always been open to more children by the usual means: by birth, by fostering, and adoption. I've always wanted nine children. He's set his heart on 12. We'll have to see how that all works out. Even the thought of more children is making my heartbeat quicken! I can hardly wait to get started!

We are excited and will be filling you in on the big move. Even though the house is moving and not the household this time, I'll still have to pack. We don't have enough room on our narrow acre to keep the trailer and put the new house on it in any logical manner. And since my camera got experimented on by a curious five-year-old (my fault) I have to share these less than stellar pictures from the auction website where we bought the house. Here it is...

 

The house is L shaped and over 2,000 square feet, too big to move in one chunk. Each section of the L will be loaded onto a truck and shipped down the road separately. The move will be towards the end of summer.

 By the time we get done with it, it will look a lot less like this. One of the first things we'll do is stucco the sides and put on a metal roof. Since we moved from our little town of Washburn last year, we live in the middle of a lot of prairie. Stucco and metal do not catch fire as easily as wood and shingle (and grassland), so it'll have a different exterior. We'll also be digging a big hidey hole off one of these porches. Since we've moved to Texas I've heard two tornadoes go by while crouching in a shelter with my family. One churned directly overhead, having hit just outside my husband's workplace before going aloft to skip over our town before it touched down again in a field. One skimmed the fields just outside of town and we heard it approach and move past. Like a non-combustible exterior, shelters are worth every penny even if you never have to use them.

This blur is the kitchen. You can't see the breakfast nook to the left or the pantry or the place where we will move the washer and dryer out to make a "goat milk" section of the kitchen to deal with all the goat milk, cheese, and related clutter (right now it's stuffed into the broken wall-oven and in a shed outside). That counter right in front of you is perfect kneading height, in case you were wondering why it's short.

Even though you can't see everything in the new kitchen, even what's on the picture is more than what we have in the trailer--shown here before we moved in, before we painted and before the wall oven broke...