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“That’s boring.”
Taking the baby from Jacob, David turned to Valerie. “Grandma’s turn.”
“Hand him over.”
As Paige watched her mother-in-law holding her newest grandson, Paige couldn’t help but think how truly blessed she was in this moment, how utterly content—
“I hate to say it, but I think he is going to look a lot like his older brother and dad,” Valerie said to David.
The words had been delivered quietly, but not so quietly that Paige wasn’t able to hear them. “Please let me pretend for at least one day that my baby’s going to look like me,” she grumbled. “Just one day.”
“You can pretend for as long as you want,” David told her.
His overly solicitous manner earned him a stinky look. “You know, you might want to take into consideration my fluctuating hormones when speaking to me,” she suggested.
“I was,” he chuckled. “That’s why I said you could pretend about the baby as long as you wanted. Otherwise, I would’ve told you to join the rest of us in the land of reality.”
Before she could give him another stinky look, Jacob asked, “What are hormones?”
“Something we’ll talk about in ten years,” David answered.
“When we talk about sperm?”
“Yep.”
When the baby woke and started to get hungry, Valerie reluctantly handed him off to Paige, before leaving with Jacob for the night. After David changed another diaper, Paige began breastfeeding, which to her relief had been relatively easy to get the hang of after a little help from one of the nurses earlier. The first few times had been slightly awkward, but now, as the baby latched onto a nipple, Paige found it to be extremely relaxing, even as David sat in a nearby chair, watching.
Shortly after the baby had been fed and burped, Jules arrived. “Oh, my God,” she said, at the sight of Paige shuffling around the room in a hospital gown. “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be in bed after just having a baby?”
“Actually, the nurses want you up and walking around as soon as possible,” Paige explained, as she made her way to the bed and gingerly climbed back in it. “They’re pretty militant about it.”
“Jesus, that sounds barbaric,” Jules muttered, taking the baby from David. “I mean, give a new mom a second to rest, since you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep for the next eighteen years.” To the swaddled baby, she cooed, “Isn’t that right?”
Jules walked over to Paige’s bed and sat down in the chair next to it. “I can’t believe you made this entirely new human. He’s adorable.”
“I made half of him, by the way,” David pointed out.
Jules ignored him.
“Thanks,” Paige said.
“Did it hurt?”
“What? Pushing a new human out of my body? No, not at all.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much did it hurt?”
“Um, a thousand. He was apparently in a hurry to get out, so there wasn’t time for an epidural, which means I had him the old-fashioned, painful way.”
Jules flinched. “That sounds really awful,” she said, throwing David a frosty look over her shoulder.
“What? I drove here as fast as I could,” he said.
“He was also almost ten pounds,” Paige added. “So—”
“Oh, my God, really?” Jules gave David another frosty look.
“Why are you blaming me for everything?” he wanted to know.
