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“You look like you’ve done that a time or two.”
“Having younger siblings is a real benefit at times.” Ellen laughed. “I didn’t always appreciate them.”
“Seems to me like when I came to visit you when your siblings were babies, you should have put me to work, instead of allowing me to just watch.”
“I didn’t know it was going to come down to this.” Ellen laughed. And he loved the sound. It stirred something deep in his soul. But it didn’t seem like the right time to talk about that.
“This is quite a welcome present for you. You’re gone for five years and come home to this.”
“Yeah. It was not what I was expecting, but I’ve had a lot of things in life that weren’t quite what I was expecting.” Coming home and hearing Chalmer talk about owning Ellen had been far worse than having a baby thrust at him.
He walked out and got the pack and play and the other bags of groceries, carrying everything in. He had spent a lot of late nights working on business-related things, getting reports ready, making PowerPoint presentations for a board meeting, and a myriad of other things, but this was the first time that he’d been up this late with Ellen, other than the one time they’d delivered the puppies so long ago.
She was tired. Her eyes were red rimmed, and her eyelids drooping, but she wasn’t grumpy. He appreciated that. He’d seen too many men who were stuck in a lifetime relationship with women who were either perpetually grumpy, easy to set off, or never satisfied. Ellen wasn’t any of those things.
Of course, if he looked for a woman of character, someone who tried to live what she believed, he wouldn’t have to worry about getting someone who was any of those things, but Ellen just lived it all so beautifully that he didn’t have to think about it, he just compared other women to her and found them wanting.
He thought about Shanna and the way she had acted with her children earlier in the evening. She’d been irritated and short and unkind. She’d taken her irritation out on them, and him, and, he was sure, on Ellen too.
But he hadn’t seen Ellen be anything but kind.
A person didn’t just naturally become that way, they had to work hard at it, to become something that wasn’t natural. Ellen had, and it was obvious that Shanna had not.
He wondered if maybe it was because everything had always come easy to Shanna. And then, when life started to get a little hard, she wasn’t prepared for that, because she’d never been tested before.
He supposed his rough childhood, and the fact that Ellen had lost her mom when she was little and had been raised by her uncle, never really fitting in with her friends at school, had been what had prompted them to be able to meet challenges with a bit of grace.
That, and he couldn’t discount the influence Jesus had on their lives.
Shanna would claim to be a Christian. So there was that. There had to be a deliberate desire to do what God wanted, he supposed.
He hadn’t figured it out by the time he got the pack and play together and turned to Ellen, who was still holding and bouncing the baby.
“Just in time. She’s starting to stir.”
He glanced at the clock. “I suppose it’s about time for her to have another bottle.”
“It would probably be a good time to change her diaper too.”
“Oh boy. Can you hold her for just a little bit more while I find a video online?”
“Or I could show you how to do it?” Ellen lowered her head and looked at him, and he grinned sheepishly.
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
He knew she wouldn’t, he just...hadn’t thought about asking her and felt a little foolish for needing to. But he didn’t want to do it wrong. Surely there was a wrong way. Although, as he thought back at some of the people who had been able to raise children to adulthood, his mom included in that group, he figured that it couldn’t possibly be rocket science, otherwise there would be a lot more dead babies in the world.
The thought was sobering, rather than humorous.
“When they’re really young, they can’t roll. But you never know when they’re going to be able to, so you can’t ever set them down without making sure that they’re on a surface they can’t roll off of.”
He nodded his head.
“I remember Ashley telling me that. I think it was something they told her in the hospital. Every once in a while, she would set the baby in the middle of the bed and maybe run to the bathroom or something, but you just have to be careful.”
“Once you drop it, you can’t put it back together.”
