Coming into Focus

Halloween has long been one of my favorite holidays. It has something to do with the costumes. They allow their owner to masquerade around under a different identity, and appearing to be something that you’re not can be quite liberating. As I drove home from work on Halloween of 2007, I wondered if I was in a costume, myself, given that my life was nowhere near as it had appeared mere months before. I knew I wasn’t, though. I felt far from liberated.

A little over a year prior, I would have been driving home to house which I shared with a brown dog and no one else – a house equipped with a refrigerator that never once contained milk. But in a span of thirteen months, I had gotten married, become a stepdad, moved twice and become the father of two boys and one girl. My bachelor days ended rather abruptly. Unlike most people, I didn’t mature into domesticity – I was hastily grandfathered into it out of necessity.

What’s more, all of these changes happened to me while our business doubled its staff and increased its revenue by fifty percent. Since the moment Caroline and I got married, chaos had been the norm for us, but once the triplets came on the scene, that chaos escalated to unprecedented heights. In spite of it, or perhaps because of it, our family was growing and evolving.

Two things happen as entities grow and evolve. First, terms of description and units of measurement change. Second they take on new characteristics. It takes time for things to turn into what they’re destined to become, and as that time passes, we not only measure them differently, but we also have an easier time defining them. Such is the case with everything, and the triplets, my family and I were no exception.

To combat all the chaos and confusion that ruled our reactionary lives, we slowly but surely locked into a routine. When we first came home, the unit by which we measured our progress was hours, but it eventually became days, and by that Halloween it was weeks. Soon enough it’d be months. Before we knew it, it’d be years. Things were starting to take shape, and as such, definitions began to emerge.

Linda proved to be the baby expert she portrayed herself as. She was extremely quick to diagnose various scenarios and even quicker to tell us what should be done to remedy them. One morning she told me that the babies weren’t sleeping well because they were gassy and suggested we try Mylicon, an over the counter. The next night, they slept better.

Sam, Jack and Kirby were all having a difficult time taking down their bottles, and though everyone suspected they were having reflux issues, Linda suggested a new formula that actually made things better and bought us some much-needed time until the doctor could officially diagnose the situation and prescribe the appropriate medicine. Linda was the one who decided when it was time to move the babies from the keeping room up to the nursery. She was also the one who first began to feed them simultaneously with the help of boppy pillows (another baby term I had to add to my vernacular) and rolled up blankets.

Every night when Linda arrived at our house, she and I would make small talk for a while (sometimes a long while) before she went up to the nursery, giving me the chance to learn far more about her than I ever thought i would. I knew all about her neighbors, the other families she had worked for, her son’s failing marriage and her stint as a Cas Walker model back when she, to borrow her words, "still had my figure.”

One night, she was even kind enough to let me in on something else – what her farts sounded like. That’s right, just as we were concluding our nightly chit chat session, I heard a muffled vibration which emanated from Linda’s backside. It was unmistakable, yet not so loud that it necessarily had to be acknowledged. An awkward silence ensued.

I know that you know that I know, but there’s no need to ‘fess up, okay? Let’s just both be adults here and simply move on.

More silence.

Quick, think of something to say. Something, anything that will keep her from saying—

“Whup-see-dayzie.”

No, please. There’s really no need to get into offering—

“My apologies,” she said while shaking her head and putting her hand over her mouth. “I had a bunch of cabbich today,” she explained.

Cabbage?

“I guess it didn’t agree with me,” she concluded

After our nightly talk, Linda would hobble up the stairs to the nursery, and I would follow (well, on that one night it’s safe to say I led) carefully carrying a tray full of a certain number of bottles with a certain number of ounces of formula in them. Those numbers were whatever Linda said.

Sam, Jack and Kirby were making progress, but even so, it was never good enough for her. She pushed them hard, sometimes too hard for our comfort, but they all three ate more and more each week, and they were making it longer between bottles. They soon went from being fed every three hours to every four. And while that might not seem like a big deal to most, it was a momentous development for us. Virtually overnight, the babies required six fewer feedings (equivalent to the number of feedings an average baby their age has in an entire day!) going from 24 down to 18.

It was impossible to know Linda and not have a variety of opinions of her. Forget her forceful way and stubborn insistence on doing things that forceful way. Just one look at her large frame and bright red frizzy hair, or one moment spent in her domineering presence was enough to form an opinion, not to mention hearing but one syllable of her thick accent.

None of those varied opinions outweighed my appreciation for her. I liked her style every bit as much as I disliked it, and all in all, unlike my wife, I was a big LQ fan. She was country as cornbread and rough around the edges, and often lacked diplomacy when conveying her thoughts, sometimes even overstepping her bounds.

But there was no arguing with her when it came to the results. She was an expert on babies and getting them through the initial few months, which made her an expert at rearing things, never pleasantly, never without an edge, never quietly, but she reared them nonetheless. I got the feeling she could have raised a litter of possum if she had the mind to, causing me to often wonder if she weren’t equipped with a set of teats on the underside of her belly.

My appreciation for her unquestionable talent did not mean we never had run ins. We did. One stemmed from an undeniable trend I began noticing one October morning.

“How’d it go?” I asked her as she made her way down stairs.

“Awwwful,” she answered in her thick drawl. “Sam’s spoilt rotten and does nuthin’ but fuss and cry. He’ll only stop when I hold him. That’s exactly what he wants, you know. Even Jack was fussin’, last night. And Kirby’s monitor goes off e’ry ten minutes. None of ‘em are eatin’ ‘nuff, and they’s always spitten’ up on me. I ne’er seen such difficult babies in all my life.”

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?

That was the third morning in a row that Linda had blown me away with her negativity. I had to find a way to combat the cancerous nature of our conversations. That night, before I went to bed, I literally rehearsed a response to the earful I was bound to get the next morning. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

“How’d it go?” I asked her the next morning in a voice a little more cheerful than usual.

“Awwwwful,” she answered, a little more venomously than normal. “Sam was fussy and Jack’s got horrible gas, and Kirby—” bla, bla, bla, bla, bla. At the end of her diatribe I didn’t say a word. Silence and silence alone ensued, punctuating her words of negativity which still lingered in the air.

“I’m sure it’s just a phase,” she said, backtracking a bit.

“You know, Linda, I’m not sure what to do with you,” I finally said. “Each and every day I come out here and ask you how it went and each and every day, you read me a laundry list of complaints about our babies. It’s almost as if you’re angry at them.”

“I don’t mean to–”

“Please, Linda,” I interrupted as I held my hand up. “I’m not finished yet.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” I continued in a very calm and pleasant tone, “We very much appreciate your efforts, not to mention your skill sets. We know it’s difficult to keep triplets through the night. But judging by the words that fly out of your mouth each and every morning, you sound surprised at how hard it is. It shouldn’t exactly be a news flash to a woman of your experience that sitting with triplets all night pretty much sucks. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have needed your help.”

“I’m sorry if I came off a little negative. I just want things to go well,” she said with a smile. I believed her.

“Well maybe I just took you the wrong way,” I answered. “Caroline and I want to help you. So if you want things to go better, all you have to do is give us suggestions. We’re all ears. But if you want a punching bag, you’ll have to find someone else.”

The great thing about people with strong personalities is that such folks can usually take a slap to the face. Linda was no exception. From that morning on, our exchanges became more productive. I continued to be a big LQ fan.

On October 19th, Sam, Jack and Kirby had their three week check up. Sam weighed five pounds, 15 ounces, Jack was six pounds four ounces and Kirby was four pounds, seven ounces, putting them in the 2nd, 3rd and less than 1st percentile respectively. But those percentiles were as compared to a full term singleton. That the triplets were even on the charts was considered very good news. Our doctor said they looked great.

By that appointment, each infant was coming into his or her own. Caroline and I had begun to see different traits in their personalities. Sam still had a face that looked a little crumpled up. His squinty eyes were dark, just like his complexion, both of which went well with the little bit of brown hair that graced the top of his head. He was still vocal, perhaps because he was having a harder time than the other two were. Though he was the biggest at birth, he had fallen behind Jack, but was still much larger than Kirby. He was the hardest to feed, as well as the one who spit up the most.

None of them interacted very much with the outside world, but Sam was a little further behind than the other two in that category. He was constantly fussy and required an inordinate amount of time and attention. In spite of that, he was nothing short of precious, and though Caroline and I could never express it very well, we both believed that there was something that lay just beneath the surface of Sam that was fragile, raw and genuine. He reminded me of the way I feel when things aren’t going my way, but I keep trying nonetheless. He reminded me of faith.

Of the three, Sam garnered the least attention from people in general, even if he did require the most attention from his parents in specific. Unlike the other two, he had no nicknames, well, except for one that was given to him by a woman whom he only met once. “Mr. Man.” But other than that short lived moniker, he was just our little Sammy.

At birth Jack had a long and lean face, but thanks to his love for the bottle, it had filled out quite a bit – as had he. Of the three, he looked the most like a “normal” baby, though he was still quite small – only "huge" compared to his siblings. His big, round eyes were brown and cloudy like Sam’s, though, his complexion was fair which sometimes seemed at odds with his fluffy, dark hair.

Jack was still unflappable. The biggest rise you could get out of him was a yawn – maybe a nose scratch. You could have taken him on a roller coaster ride, and his expressions wouldn’t have changed. His eyes were almost always closed, even when he was wide awake. If we didn’t know any better, we would have suspected it was because he’d already seen it all and done it all a thousand times.

People flocked to him because of his laid back manner, and the ease with which he took his bottle made him the logical choice when it came deciding who an outsider should feed. Even someone who had never held a baby in his or her life could pick Jack up and get him to drink his bottle as fast as Linda Quillen could. It didn’t matter who. He would have been content in the arms of Bigfoot.

He earned the nickname “Biggs,” (which was a source of endless confusion for Briggs), and before long one thing became undeniable. He bore a striking resemblance to Dom DeLouise, who, I think we’d all agree was brilliant as Burt Reynolds’ comic foil in such American classics as Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II and my personal favorite, Smokey and the Bandit II, where he appeared as the incomparable Captain Chaos. But thanks to Jack and his auto pilot nature, things were a lot less chaotic around our house than they would have been.

Kirby, with her fair skin, well defined lips, bubble nose, thin tuft of light auburn hair, and beautiful, bright eyes that seemed destined for Carolina blue, was a little dream. She hardly ever cried. She would typically nap right up until it was time to feed, eat a bit, then fall back asleep. If it weren’t for changing and feedng her, we may have never picked her up at all, simply because she never seemed to need to be held. We guessed that it was because she spent the first two weeks of her life in the NICU where babies outnumbered nurses who couldn’t give the amount of attention to each one that a parent would.

Kirby’s disposition was a perfect match for the patience that was required from her. We almost always fed them in their birth order and that meant she was last. (Unlike Linda, neither Caroline nor I simultaneously fed very often. We had done it, but usually chose not to because they ate better and kept more of what they ate down when we gave them individual attention.)

Kirby continued to make funny faces frequently, most often while she ate. She bore a strong resemblance to Franklin the Turtle and also had a splash of Homer Simpson in her, but neither of those two names made the otherwise long list of nicknames she had acquired. We did, however, regularly call her “Li’l bit,” “peanut,” “birdie,” “ostrich” and “little momma.”

Silent as a mouse (except for her damn monitor which constantly sounded off false alarm after false alarm), she was our baby girl, not to mention the early favorite of our older baby girl, as Alli doted on her constantly.

Through the first several weeks, Caroline and I had developed a strong yet different bond with each of them. We couldn’t wait for more time to pass. We were dying to find out what and who these miraculous little people would continue to become.

I was already seeing what our Home Depot account was becoming at work -- a pain in the ass. Home Depot jobs had become a significant percentage of our business – as nearly a quarter of our revenue was derived from their granite orders. Our workmanship, however, remained poor, and because of it and the higher-than-normal volume fueled by our new account, our turn times were five to six weeks – two full weeks more than we felt was acceptable for our customers. Ordinarily, November and December gave us a much-needed time to catch our breath, but thanks, in part, to Home Depot, it looked like that would not be the case this year.

But long turn times and high volume were not why it was a pain. We still weren’t approved as a vendor within the Home Depot system, and the payments from Regal weren’t coming in as quickly as we had thought they would. Then we heard the rumour. A vendor told us that he had heard Regal was having financial difficulty. We had completed $50,000 worth of jobs, but to that point had only received a little over $12,000 of payments and those payments seemed to be slowing down. We were officially worried.

I had called Brad Douglass several times to check on certain invoices and he (or more often his assistant) would always say the same thing – “We haven’t gotten payment yet, but when we do, we’ll cut a check for you immediately.” I was starting to doubt them.

After some research, I found out that many of the open invoices we had out to Regal were for jobs that Home Depot showed they had already paid. After more digging, I learned that the checks for those jobs had actually been cashed by Regal. But when I asked Regal to double check them, they still maintained that they had not received the money yet.

Ever more frustrated, I had no choice but to call a regional Home Depot manager, Jack Alcorn, to fill him in on the situation. He, too, had heard the rumors about Regal and vowed to look into the matter.

“Listen, Alcorn,” I told him, “I’m in a weird spot here. I appreciate Regal for introducing us to you. I’d prefer they not know that I called you specifically to help with this matter.” He assured me he’d find a way to bring it up without implicating me.

An hour later I was told Brad was holding for me on line one.

“Hey, Brad,” I began.

“What the fuck, Osborne?” he snapped.

“What are you talking about?”

“Who the fuck do you think you are to throw us under the bus like that to Home Depot?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

“Jack Alcorn just called and asked me why we hadn't paid you for jobs that we have already been paid on. Osborne, I told you to call me if you had any questions.”

“I have been calling you, Brad. For weeks now. Every fucking time I do, you tell me you’ve not been paid.” I paused to collect myself. The last thing I wanted was a full fledged war. All I wanted to get paid in a reasonably timely manner. “Alcorn called me today and asked me how everything was going. I told him the truth. ‘The jobs are going great, but it sure is taking a lot longer than I thought it would to get paid.’ He was surprised, Brad, and told me he’d get to the bottom of it. Whatever he did from there that’s gotten you all pissed off is something you’ll have to talk to him about. But he left me with the impression that Regal has been paid on more than what you’ve paid out to us."

“Just because we get paid doesn’t mean we have access to the money. As soon as it clears our account, you’ll get paid. Got it? It’s not that big of a deal.” he concluded angrily.

“Brad?”

“What?” he snapped.

“If it’s not a big deal, why are you so upset?”

A week later we received a large check that cleared up several invoices, but still left approximately $20,000 we were owed. I called to inquire about the balance and was told to direct future questions to a guy named Chris Morgan who worked for an outside accounting firm that managed Regal’s books.

Chris told me the remaining invoices had been “approved for payment” and that a check was to be cut and mailed out the following day. One week later, we hadn’t gotten anything. I called Chris to find out why. He said the check had been “vetoed.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“Sean Creswell (one of the owners) said not to pay it. That’s all I can tell you.”

So I called Regal and left Sean a voice mail demanding answers. Later that day, I got the following email from him:

John:
I heard from Chris that you are concerned about our payments to you.

Please understand that there is a considerable lag time as it relates to our access to the funds.

Home Depot posts jobs as paid and mails us the checks. This time frame usually takes around 7-10 days.

When Regal (or anyone else for that matter) deposits a check that is from out of State or over $10,000.00 (which all HD checks are) the bank holds the funds for 10 business days. This policy is a function of the Federal Government and has to do with terrorism.

Therefore from the time a job is posted to the time we have access to the funds can be up to 20 business days. Subsequently I’ve made payments to you when I have yet to receive access to the money paid to me by HD. I should also mention that we spend a significant amount of administrative time on these jobs both on the front end and the back end and have never asked for compensation. In short this is a pain in the ass with no up-side to Regal.

I will send your payments as soon as possible without spending any more time or money on it than I already do. This should be acceptable given the circumstances.

SEC

What a jerk! He’s not the only one who got out of state checks for over $10,000. We regularly received such payments from another home store, and we have access to the money the next day. Twenty business days from the time he receives a check until he has access to the funds? So we're to expect payments one to two business months after we've installed the jobs? Because of an act that “has to do with terrorism?” Sounded more like the delay was on account of an act that had to do with bullshit to me.

And who was he to bitch about all the administrative tasks they were doing for free by being the middle man? I wasn’t bitching about not receiving a fee for being a collection agency. Besides, if they had their shit together, this whole thing should have been a piece of cake. Flag an invoice, receive a check, cut another one for the same amount. BOOM. Done.

I penned the following response:

Steve,

We also receive out of state checks which exceed $10,000. If deposited before 2:00pm, our funds are always available the next day which tells me our bank must not enforce the terrorist policy you referenced with the same fervor as yours. Point being, your email is the first I’ve ever heard of funds taking up to 10 additional business days to hit your account.

Please understand that we want out of this current payment arrangement as badly as you do. I’m in touch w/ HD daily and they assure me that we’re very close to being approved in their system. We’re sorry you’ve been inconvenienced and appreciate the sentiment you expressed in your email. When you think about it, that’s exactly what our gripe is – doing a lot of work and not being compensated for it.

I want to close by making one thing abundantly clear – each and every time I’m told to expect a $20,000 check and don’t receive that check in a reasonable period of time, I’m going to follow up. I’m certain you would do the same thing.

JO

Fortunately for both parties, the matter was resolved by the first Friday of November. I drove home that night, relieved that my company finally had all the money we were owed, but daunted by the prospect of my real job which lay ahead – keeping the triplets with Caroline through the weekend.

Those next two days didn’t go so well. Sam, while always fussy and difficult, had turned into a full blown crier. But that wasn’t all. If it truly is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, then at the ripe old age of five weeks, Kirby was ahead of her time. For that weekend, she matured into a woman (equipped with pipes that even Aretha Franklin would be proud of) when she decided that being silent didn’t suit her that well after all. She became become a crier overnight, and though she didn’t cry as often as Sam, the volume was deafening. We thought about calling the Discovery Channel to send a film crew over to our house, as how something that weighed less than four and a half pounds could emit a sound so deafening could well have been the eighth wonder of the world.

It wasn’t just piercing cries we were up against. Vomit reared its ugly head as well. The babies had just started a reflux medicine called Zantac the day before, but it hadn’t taken any noticeable effect. And the benefits gained from the formula switch that Linda recommended had proven to be short lived. All three were having a hard time keeping anything down.

And to add insult to injury, the bowel movement brigade was in full force. What had first been tiny, contained and innocuous beads of tar-like residue left neatly in a diaper had suddenly become mudslides splattered with seeming malice.

That night, as Alli slept peacefully in her bed, her momma and I bunkered down in the nursery next door in a war-like environment – no infantry, just infants – no gunfire, just currents of projectile vomit – no bombs, just BMs.

Through it all, Caroline and I tried to get some rest. I took the day bed and Caroline rested on the trundle bed she pulled out from under it. By midnight, the loud sounds of misery came fast and furious causing us both to get up and down every twenty minutes or so. A shrill cry louder than any of the previous ones, woke us up at 3:00am. Caroline pulled herself up from the trundle bed and walked over to Kirby’s crib.

“It’s okay,” she cooed as she patted our littlest’s tummy. The sound came again, even louder, causing Caroline to instinctively duck for cover. She started to resume her massage of Kirby before she realized that she was standing at the wrong crib. The noise had come from Sam, a bit more piercing than his usual effort. She withdrew her hand from Kirby’s crib and took an initial step toward Sam’s before she tripped over something and fell to the ground.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

That damn monitor.

The reaction that ensued was bedlam – Sam, Jack and Kirby all crying in unison, somehow drowned out the noise of the apnea false alarm. I got up and tried to turn off the monitor but couldn’t. The noise was no longer being stifled by the cries of our trio, at least not to my ears once I was directly upon it, so I lay on top of the machine, suffocating the sound with my body as I pulled in vain at the power chord in a futile attempt to unplug it. It was wrapped around the leg of Kirby’s crib.

I crawled to the wall, careful to keep the monitor under the muffling cover of my stomach, and finally succeeded in cutting off the power at which point the offending beep relented, giving the entire stage to the chorus of babies’ cries which then filled the air without competition. Caroline tended to Sam, the agent of origin in this particular attack, and immediately identified the rebel’s primary gripe. He had pooped.

By the time we finished the 8:00pm feedings and got the triplets down on Sunday, Caroline and I raced to the kitchen as if in a contest to see who could mix a drink the fastest. It was a tie. After getting our babies their final bottle before Linda Quillen would mercifully take over, it appeared as if we needed a bottle ourselves.

The first couple of weekends keeping the babies had been exercises in excitement – our adrenaline was at full force and our little trio provided little resistance. Exhausting? Yes. Trying? Of course. But we laughed in the face of all the unpleasantries, knowing that the love inside our hearts, infinite in nature, was all the fuel we’d need to navigate the difficult 48 hour block of time. Nothing could stop us. We were living the dream – one diaper change at a time.

The next weekend and the one I just detailed? All that flowery shit had worn off, except the love, of course, but I ran out of gooey metaphors to help us keep going. Caroline had an idea.

“I want to get help on the weekends,” she said to me that Sunday night as we mixed our second drink. “I know a woman named Sydney we can talk to. I think she’d do it.”

When Caroline and I had initially discussed the concept of hiring people to help us with the babies, I had been reluctant for two primary reasons. Number one – it was expensive, too expensive, frankly, for me to afford. But thanks to Caroline, we could easily afford it. That still didn’t make it any less of a bitter pill for me to swallow.

I’ve always been one who has lived comfortably and happily within his means but marrying Caroline and having triplets within thirteen months mean significant changes to my lifestyle. I had already (reluctantly) signed off on a house that I couldn’t even afford half of. Now my wife was adding to a dizzying carousel of handlers that was beginning to rival that of Brittney Spears?

My second objection was that it felt like cheating. After all, we had been the ones who were blessed with triplets. We would be the ones who would reap all the joys that they would bring. Shouldn’t we also be the ones who were burdened by them as well?

The experiences of the prior weeks had gotten me past both objections. If we weren’t in the position to be able to afford extra help, I strongly suspected there’d be a long line of volunteers from our network of family and friends, as well as from our church who would have been more than happy to fill in the gaps. That’s what good people do – they help others who need it. And that we needed help in light of adding three infants to a blended household was a given. We would have had to find it one way or the other. Being able to afford it and not taking advantage of it? We’d be absolute fools, or misers, one.

As far as the cheating part, I quickly learned that we could have hired the entire staff of a day care facility and there’d still be plenty to do. My fatherly duties, even with all the help we had, dwarfed those of my peers. I was amazed at the density of my days. Each and every minute was filled with a task. Idle time? There had never been very much to begin with, but with the advent of the trips, idle time could best be described in terms of the Kelvin temperature scale – absolute zero.

Without help, times that were quite trying would have become times that were quite miserable. As Caroline always said, why would we want there to come a point when we dreaded being with the babies? That’s what our weekends were becoming. We didn’t want that. We wanted our time with them to be joyful and fulfilling – not just for us, but for them, too.

Hiring people to help would never impoverish us, but more importantly, having that help would virtually guarantee that the time we spent with out babies would actually enrich us.

So how did I react when Caroline suggested we get Sydney to help on the weekends?

“I look forward to meeting her.”

Thanksgiving came with the blink of an eye that year. It was getting harder and harder to remember how many weeks old they were, so I started expressing their age in months. That morning, as I looked at Linda Quillen’s spreadsheet, I noticed that as of the night before, she was no longer charting their formula intake with milliliters. She had moved on to ounces.

As much as I love Halloween, it doesn't hold a candle to Thanksgiving, for it is my very favorite holiday. Unlike so many others, it’s managed to maintain its integrity through the years. Uniquely unadulterated, Thanksgiving has refused to be whored out by Hallmark executives. It has never bowed down to the almighty dollar. What you see with Thanksgiving is truly what you get. There are no cards, no stockings, no gifts – just fellowship, food and gratitude.

We hauled Alli and the babies over to Caroline’s cousin’s house and had our meal there. Caroline’s side of the family was out in full force, and though there was some garden-variety family tension that was swirling around that day, none of it managed to land on Alli, Caroline, Sam, Jack, Kirby or me. We were too busy being thankful.

As we sat and listened to Caroline’s mom read a long prayer she had written down on a piece of paper, a prayer which evoked a startling amount of emotion from her, Kirby made the moment even more awkward by going nuts via her trademark wail.

When it became clear she wouldn’t stop, I went to the other room and picked her up out of her car seat and gently rocked her to and fro. Just like that, the crying stopped.

I held Kirby and looked into little blue eyes that didn’t exist last Thanksgiving. I knelt down and gently touched Sam’s cheek, then Jack’s nose. They were both sleeping peacefully. Last year at that time, Caroline and I had not even been married for three months. This year we were a family of six. There were many times during that year when things could have turned out badly, but they never did. My marriage was strong, the business was surviving, Alli was becoming a big girl and our infants were all three healthy and developing by the hour.

I laid Kirby in her seat, but as I stood, she started to cry again. I swooped back down and picked her up and put her over my shoulder and gently patted her back as I made my way back into the dining room, humbled by all I had to be thankful for.