AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They knew that if they woke up after a nightmare that literally any of the beds of the adults were open for any of them to crawl into. They knew that they were loved times five, each of them part of the bright center of our large and lovely family.
Sometimes, life was tough. Sometimes we all contracted a stomach virus and spent three days in agony, trying not to knock over buckets we had to keep everywhere—that little ones couldn’t manage to use either. Sometimes it seemed as if we were in the middle of constant potty training, and that the older children wanted to regress when we tried to potty train the younger ones.
But mostly, those sorts of worries just faded into the background. Mostly, we were lost to our love for our sweet children, who had been born out of our love for each other. Mostly, we just felt lucky.
Jennifer was five years old the year that we took a family vacation back to one of those cabins in the north. This time, we had to stay in one with a lot more bedrooms and there was no sex in the snow, just hours of time in the white-blanketed fields making snowmen and some trips to the slopes with us and the older kids.
Jennifer couldn’t say ‘ski.’ Something about mixing the S and the K was tripping her up, so she decided to call them snow sticks, and this was taken up by Nicholas, who was only two and a half, and he didn’t say Ses at all, so he just ran around in front of the fireplace saying, “I big enough for no ticks too! Yes? I big boy, not like Madeleine, who still a baby.”
As anyone knows, there are only so many times you can disagree with a toddler before you decide it’s a lost cause.
Soon enough, all the little ones were on makeshift toy skis in front of the fire, pretending to go down the slopes, happy as anything with the substitution.
“I big boy too,” said Madeleine, pointing to her play skis. She was eighteen months old.
“You’re a big girl,” said Devlin, pulling her onto his lap.
“She can be a boy if she wants,” said Sinclair.
“I just like Nicholas,” said Madeleine, who worshiped her older brother in that way of small children.
“Exactly like Nicholas,” agreed Sinclair, leaning over to kiss her nose and then kissing Devlin before he went to sit down in an easy chair near the fireplace.
Nicholas settled down on his “no ticks” and shook his head. “Only I am Nicholas,” he declared, very serious.
“Yes, dear heart,” I said, smiling at him.
And only we were us.
Our pack. Our family. Our own safe place to belong.
* * *
