Minnesota Prairie Roots

At our house we typically don't have birthday cakes. Rather, the birthday celebrant chooses the dessert of his/her choice, and often that's cheesecake like this one my eldest made for my September birthday. Today I'm making a chocolate chip cheesecake for my son's 17th birthday.

MY SON TURNS 17 today, a day before my eldest turns 25. It wasn’t planned that way—to have their birthdays one day shy of eight years apart. But it happened and the two have never complained about the closeness of their birthdays.

For those of you who don’t know my family, there’s another daughter in between, my 23-year-old, who is 21 months younger than her older sister.

I know, I know, I’m tossing a lot of numbers out there for someone who prefers words to numbers and sucks at math.

But here are some more figures as long as I’m spewing them out. Even though my boy was born 10 days early, he weighed 10 pounds, 12 ounces, and stretched to 23 ½ inches. Yikes, you’re thinking. Not to worry. Like his sisters before him, he was born by Cesarean section due to the fact that the eldest was frank breech, requiring an emergency, vertical-incision C-section.

She weighed 9 pounds, 7 ounces. Her sister came in at 8 pounds, one ounce.

Yes, I have big babies.

My son was so big, in fact, that the hospital’s newborn diapers didn’t fit him. I also had to return a package of newbie diapers that a friend had given me before my over-sized baby boy was born.

You would never guess looking at my lanky 17-year-old today that he was once a roly-poly baby. He’s tall and lean now, tall and lean.

I’m wondering, if you’re a mom, do you reflect on your child’s birth every year on his/her birthday like I do? I remember that first kiss I planted on my son’s soft, warm head right after his birth. He was then whisked away while the surgeon tidied up after my C-section and followed with hernia surgery.

That first week after my boy’s  February 9, 1994, birth is mostly a painful blur as I suffered spinal headaches so severe I couldn’t sit up, let alone care for my newborn. Instead, the obstetrical floor nurses mothered him, coddled him, loved him. They even carried my baby boy into the break room, which would be a definite no-no today. I’ll always be grateful for their care.

I am thinking all of these thoughts today, a day when I’ll hold my teen a little closer, a little tighter—if he’ll allow it—and embrace him with a mother’s birthday hug.

Happy birthday, son. I love you now and forever. (I know you don’t read my blog, but I’m telling you anyway, just in case you read this someday.)

© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling