8.5.14 There She'd Be, With The Most Complete Love You've Ever Seen In Your Life

For years, I would clean them up; then lug them down to Sears, where we would go find the photographer's little folding card table set up, with backgrounds to choose from, and try to keep them sane and leave the store in one piece, while waiting for the kids ahead of us in line.

  Oh, and the photographer would always be certain that their job was to elicit some kind of enormous fake-out smile, and no matter what I said to any of them, they would try and try to make my kids grin like....I don't know.   

          But mine would hear me imploring the guy, and ignore  him lurking  behind the little black drape over his head, and they'd grin just at me, their delicious mischievous selves, and I'd smile into their hearts and laugh at them all, while they did try hard for those few moments to sit there and please.

And then they'd be free again, thank goodness, and I'd count out the dollars and bite my lip trying to pick out how many of what size, while I held onto the wiggliest one, while the other two would bicker, til we were done there.

  

    When it was just my oldest, I'd say " Great job ! ...let's go find your Nannie" and we'd tromp through the winding path of the huge store to where Kevin's mother worked...given just enough hours that they didn't

have to pay benefits  ...and there she'd be, smiling and bending down to pick him up with the most complete love  you've ever seen in your life- her deep brown eyes meeting his, her whole body smiling, as she called him 'Babe" and "Dahling" and asked when the photos of 'her precious' would be ready.

 She was gone, when the two younger were born, but we'd go on by Penney's then, once a year, a few days after we'd gone by to get a new set of clothes, dress them up, clean them off, and they'd be good sports and sit there for the still silly guy, trying to make them smile different than the perpetual grins on all of them.     

When my daughter was a born, I did have a dream. She and I were asleep, and my mother-in-law came to us, woke us, and said that she had always wanted a grand daughter.    

     

          Picked that baby up in her loving arms, smiling her effervescent smile, and danced around the room. Danced and danced with her granddaughter  ; and I sat up in  the bed and cried and smiled, and then woke, holding that baby,  tears on my face.