THREE OR MORE TUESDAY: ABIGAIL'S BIRTHDAY!

Good morning everyone!! Today is Three Or More Tuesday and our hostess is Tam at A Gypsy's Corner. Please visit her and take a trip around blogland to visit everyone participating! Today is my baby's birthday!! Abby is 18!!!!!! Wow. This birthday is having more of an effect on her mother than her! I watched her getting ready for school this morning (above is a picture of her just before school. Today they are having the photograph of the Seniors taken and they are allowed to wear dress clothes, no uniform today, and make-up and jewelry). How nice to let these girls show some personal style! Twelve years in uniform, Abby was ready to flaunt her stuff!!

This is Abby and her best friend Nora in San Diego last summer. If we lived near a coast, she would be a beach bum. She loves water. She learned to water ski at the lake when she was just seven. She got up the first time and she is an awesome skier! She has swam with the dolphins in Mexico and she used to lay at the end of our dock up at the lake and catch blue gills with her bare hands!! In the summer here in Chicago, she and groups of her friends take the train downtown and go to Oak Street Beach for the day. She is a waterbug!!!

Here she is with Nora again.

In case you are wondering how I have fit this birthday subject into TOMT, it is because when I had Abby, I already had three children! Get it~Three Or More... ;-)

She was a wonderful surprise. Eighteen years and nine months ago, I was sitting on my front porch just as the sun went down, sipping a beer and just daydreaming (I do that a lot!). Suddenly I had a little jolt, a thought just entered my mind out of nowhere...I was late. As in past 28 days. I thought and I thought as most blonde's do, and then I just knew. I scurried off to the drugstore for a kit, hid it and went to bed. I needed to wait for that first mornings, er...pee, to get all those good hormones and waking up at 5:00 a.m., I really needed to

go! POSITIVE!!! I ran and jumped on the bed to tell The Husband, who didn't even know of my suspicion, and well, I know the first thought going through his mind was 'another college tuition', so I'll leave out his first response! Oh, that pregnancy glow started that morning!! :-)

Above: Friends from school...

On April 6, 1991, I was sitting in our family room with my neighbor and good friend Sue. Chicago was having a record breaking 80 degree day and I was hot, sweaty and irritable. I was complaining that I had no summer maternity clothes, I was wearing one of The Husband's old polo shirts. "I want this baby to come now!" I said to Sue. "Jane," she said, "you have three more weeks." Sigh. Mumbling. During the middle of that hot night I woke up totally drenched. My water had broke. I woke up The Husband, called the doctor and took a shower. Tried to awaken The Husband again, packed my bag and called my in~laws to come and stay with the other three. Tried to awaken The Husband again. Finally, at the top of my lungs I yelled, "Hey Mister, this ain't no fishing trip!!!"

I was in labor three hours and pain free. My beautiful doctor Kimberly had me get an epidural right away. "There is absolutely no reason for a women to be in pain for this," she said. God I love her!! Abby weighed only five pounds. We got to hold her for a few minutes before they whisked her off to the preemie unit. Her head was the size of a baseball, but a few hours later they let me have her again and she was declared perfectly healthy for being three weeks early.

Abby and her boyfriend of three years, Dylan. He is a wonderful guy and we just love him Tonight the whole family is going out to dinner to celebrate. We had a big extended family party Sunday night which was so much fun. Her gift from The Husband and I is her online shopping trip to Forever 21 to buy clothes for her trip to Jamaica next Monday and her surprise gift for tonight is a Irish Claddah ring with her birthstone.

I am having a crazy paradox of memories today as well as thoughts of the future. Eighteen is a milestone birthday not only for her, but me also. It isn't just a number anymore. She really is an adult and I have to start letting go. She will be going away to college in August, a state university in Illinois about 150 miles away. Gone will be the days of tip~toeing around her morning crankiness, seeing her rush in from school at 3:00 in her grey uniform and bookbag, excitedly telling me the latest drama that occurred in school that day. No more snuggling on my bed at night reading and watching The Hills, Gossip Girl and MTV. No more holding my eyes open until 1:00 a.m. waiting for her to come home. My nest will finally be empty.

She is starting a new chapter of many chapters in her life. I hope we have equipped her with all the values, examples, education and compassion that we can only hope she uses wisely for the rest of her life. She is a strong, independent young woman and she has never let me down once in my life. No more than I was given an instruction book with my first baby, I do not have anything to prepare myself for letting go. I suppose I will learn as I go along, such as life is.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ABBY!!!! I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!!!!!

xoxo

Jane