I had thought that I would do a lot of blogging on my maternity leave, but G will be 8 weeks old on Saturday and here I am just now getting around to writing something new.

Part of that is a symptom of simply learning to manage life with two children, especially during the flurry of the holiday season; we are doing well, and L is an amazing big brother and really is adjusting beautifully, but our days are full, our hands are full, and we are exhausted. Instead of blogging, I have been chugging coffee, doing an endless stream of laundry, supermomming out on our daily advent activities, and mitigating that by accidentally washing the baby’s hair with dish soap, getting chocolate stains on her onesies, and literally falling asleep while reading aloud to L in the mid-afternoon.

But the other part of it is that I think I’m not exactly sure what to say. By the time I started blogging about our experience with L, we were nearly three years removed from the start of our journey. I had had weeks and months and years to process what we have experienced; countless hours spent pumping or sitting around a hospital room or holding a sleeping child to think through how I felt about it and what I had to say about it. But having a healthy baby after having a sick one is a brand new experience, and I’m not sure I can offer any profound takeaways just yet.

Much of this is strange and new; since L was 4.5 months old before he left the hospital, we have never really taken care of a newborn before. G has been an incredibly easy baby so far, aside from being an extraordinarily accomplished spitter-upper (we are no strangers to vomiting, but I had NO idea that this kind of volume could come from a healthy baby!), and I am slowly getting used to the fact that it really can be this easy.

I wasn’t sure how I would react to having a second child after L, but most of our days are ordinary, without time to stop and think and reflect on each small thing as it happens. I do think in some ways the weight of all we lost with L, of all the things we didn’t get to experience with him, has taken on new significance, because before I only knew what I imagined life with a newborn should have been like, but now I actually know, and in some ways that makes it painful all over again.

But the Big Feelings tend to lurk below the surface, fragmented, and popping up raw and overwhelming only occasionally. The first time I saw Z lift G from the warmer where she had been taken for a boost of oxygen just moments after birth, the total absence of tubes and wires was physically jarring to me in a way that’s hard to describe; and I did not sleep a wink that night as I tried to wrap my head around how you’re supposed to know your baby is still alive without the constant soft beep of monitors reassuring you that her heart is beating, that she is in fact still breathing. It seemed almost irresponsible to leave her tiny, brand new body lying there so unattached to anything that could register the first sign of a problem. Even now, nearly 2 months later, I am still occasionally surprised to not feel a G-tube under her sleeper, and I still can’t shake a sudden jolt of panic as I remind myself again that it’s really, actually fine to get her chest wet at bathtime.

I had expected some anxiety, but it has manifested in ways I did not expect. For example, for so long when L was a baby his poops were SO frequent and SO loose and made his skin SO raw, and were such an ever-present reminder that his gut wasn’t functioning the way it should, and also I guess I didn’t realize how frequently a healthy newborn would poop, so for the first several days I had an unexpected moment of dismay every time I realized G was pooping again. In the same vein, she seems to be healthy and gaining and growing beautifully, but I still cannot see the really quite impressive volume of spit-up that spews forth on a regular basis without feeling compelled to find a way to fix this problem, because so much of L’s babyhood was spent cleaning up vomit, evaluating all the variables and trying to fix it. And – and this one is not exactly new or unexpected, as it’s kind of been my operating mode for awhile now – the better things go for us, the more I imagine some heinous thing lurking just around the corner, and the more fearful I am that we will pay for this streak of good luck with something truly horrendous just over the horizon.

On the whole though, I can say this: I was not okay when Luke was born, and I was not okay for a very long time after that, but I have healed a great deal mentally and emotionally since then. I would not have taken on a second pregnancy without truly believing that I was in a much better place, because I know the extent to which many women struggle in the first few weeks and months postpartum even with healthy babies; but the last eight weeks have in many ways been healing for me, and for us as a family, more so than I had even dared to hope.

I find myself still yet trying to wrap this up with a neat and tidy takeaway, so I’m going to stop now, because our story as a family of four is just beginning to unfold, and leave you simply with a picture of my heart:

Follow @ThisGutsyLife on Twitter