Jonthan's Little Footprint

My 5 year old, Bria, had a play date today. As we were chatting about families, my darling said, "We have 6 people in our family. Our baby brother is in heaven." Her friend gave a bit of an odd look. Then, my 3 year old, Adriann said "Yeah, he's heaven. I don't know why."
Bria: he was born to early
friend: my mommy's cousin had a baby who is in heaven too.
my thought: oh good, she has some sort of context to put this in!

When the friends mom came to pick her up I felt I needed to share a bit about the conversation, just in case it comes up at the dinner table at their house.

It's amazing the stuff kids come up with. Bria hardly ever brings up Jonathan. She doesn't draw him in family pictures or anything. But here she felt the need. Maybe it's because her friend has two brothers, she may have felt the need to let it be known that she has a brother too. Good for her. Claim him proudly, he deserves it.

I was sharing with a friend yesterday, actually, she was encouraging me, about the pride we do have in our babies. My friend, Shaina, has also lost a baby. She was right. I am so proud of Jonathan. Every time I see his picture I beam with pride, just like a do with my girls. I still feel the sense of sadness and loss, but I feel the pride taking over. He was just so precious and has made a huge impact in our lives. He never saw us, we never saw his eyes, but I feel like I have looked deeply into them. I feel like I really do know him, despite the little that we did know.

I know that he was a thumb sucker, he was sucking his thumb in a couple of ultra sounds (when you have an IUD in a goofy place, you get a lot of ultra sounds). It is fun to know this partially because only one of our girls is a thumb sucker, Kyla, and she was also sucking away in the ultra sound. I know that he had the cutest nose and lips and in one picture of him and I can absolutely see the family resemblance to the girls.

In my mind he has a personality more like our middle daughter. She is more of an introvert. I have always had the sense that she lost a real buddy in Jonathan. I picture him as more of a book reader like Adriann, an observer. I don't know why. Maybe because that would be more descriptive of my husband. Maybe because the first and third girls are more extroverted like I am, so of course they would be evenly divided.

In one of my ultra sounds, the doctor was in the room and has he looked the image on the screen he said that this baby was going to do great things. The intern, the nurse and I began to speculate what those things could be. Tangible things like finding the cure for cancer, professional sports, Computer genius (Steve Jobs with Apple, not the other guy). All the kinds of things that the world values and would support his parents in our old age! Well, the doctor was right, Jonathan will do great things. He will have an impact.