Today would have been my Oma’s 98th birthday. It is also this girl’s 12th birthday!
It is appropriate that they share a birthday, as they are very much alike. They are outwardly quiet and appear to be easy going and always gentle. Inside they are analytical, fierce, perfectionistic, and utterly brilliant. My Oma went to college for a degree in mathematics and learned how to program computers back when women were not going to college for mathematics, much less learning how to program these newfangled computers. She loved to collect tiny things from her travels, and everything in her house was exactly where she wanted it to be. She was unbothered by what the world thought of her. Instead, she mastered her corner of creation and made it beautiful. Sunshine asks questions about theology and philosophy, understands her school subjects almost with explanation, has an interest in and grasps abstract concepts, and adores all things tiny and adorable. Her bedroom is picture perfect, her toys and things are perfectly organized and in the proper place, and she is unbothered by what the world thinks of her. Both have graceful and feminine confidence that can rival and beat the loudest, snarkiest, militant feminist.
One of the benefits of a July birthday in our family is that you may spend your birthday in a new, magical place.
She wanted presents, pizza, rice krispy treats, any dessert that included free access to ample sugary toppings, a trip to water, and some kind of fun park adventure, like mini golf, or a trampoline park.
Of course, whatever you want, miss princess.
We brought her presents, we got her pizza, we found a rice krispy treat, a frozen yogurt shop where the toppings were beyond ridiculously plentiful, and then headed to the trampoline park.
She’s always been a bouncy baby girl. We weren’t so sure she would be anything but sickly until she was about 4 months old. My midwife wasn’t happy that I had a sonogram at 5-ish months, she said it would harm Sunshine, but the room was very silent as they looked at her. There was something very wrong, they thought. They sent me to a 3D fancy pants ultrasound guy to get a clearer picture. What he found was a large hole in her heart. My doctor didn’t think it would close up well without surgery. I was ok with this. Babies are not always well when born. Then my water broke early, and she wouldn’t get ready to be born. 3 weeks later, she finally got sick of all the acupuncture and bouncing around I had to do to start labor. But then she was huge, and wouldn’t come out. For three days we tried everything to get her out. When she was born, the operating room went from concerned, to silent, to negative silent. She was huge but not well. They wouldn’t tell us what was wrong with her. He NICU pod mate was the smallest baby they ever had at that hospital. Sunshine was 2 weeks early, but 11 pounds. He heart was swishy and working ok, but that hole needed to close up, and they were only giving it a few months. She didn’t want to eat. She wasn’t comfortable in any position. She was so fat that her cheeks covered her mouth and nose so she could barely breathe. And they wouldn’t tell us what was wrong with her. For four days we sat and waited and tried to get answers. Nobody would talk to us. There were tiny babies near death to take care of, and this enormous baby with a mom sitting there all day and night didn’t need to be attended to. So why were we there? This was the best NICU in the county, maybe in the state, maybe in the world, and we sat and sat without answers. We figured out that she just wasn’t an urgent case, and so we would be on the back burner indefinitely. We wanted to go home. So we transferred her to the hospital next to our house. As the paramedic wheeled her out to the ambulance, the lead NICU doctor ran out after us. He was baffled. We were baffled. We had been trying to meet with him for 4 days, and here he was looking angry that we would dare move out of there. “She has pneumonia. If she doesn’t get good care she could die.” Um….ok. The NICU doctor at the new hospital happened to be best friends with Dr. Baffled.
Well, here’s the thing. Sunshine takes her time. You don’t rush this girl. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she does it her way. She’s not particularly bratty, and her ways are not unreasonable. In fact, what she wants generally corresponds to what everyone else wants but couldn’t quite put into words. She came home when she was ready. She hated nursing, and she wasted away to only 14 lb. at 6 months old. She refused to eat. I switched her to my own formula concoction, and she loved that. Maybe it was what she had been asking for all along. Her heart healed and by 2 months old, the murmur was hardly detectable. By 4 months, it was gone. Her doctor was surprised and pleased. He told me, “She is a very sweet and contented baby for having such strong likes and dislikes.”
Well, here we are today, still amazed that she is such a sweet, contented person for having likes and dislikes of steel. And she loves to jump, to climb, to dance, to sing, but always gracefully and effortlessly.
When Sunshine was 1, our family went on a road trip with our tent trailer. We put our sweet babies to bed, Sunshine got to sleep with the big kids, and settled in for what promised to be a great night’s sleep.
Something screamed. There was something right outside the trailer. We checked the door, it was locked. We were half asleep, falling over one another. The kids were sitting up and looking around in wonder. We counted them. One, two….where’s Sunshine???
There’s that moment in parenthood when you question everything. You question your adulthood, your ability to drive, all of your life choices, your own IQ, your very existence. That was the moment for me. Somehow, Sunshine was outside of the trailer, the door was still locked, and the rest of us had slept through whatever happened.
We fetched our screaming baby and discovered that the Velcro on the tent part of the trailer had failed, and baby girl had fallen through the hole, somehow didn’t become tangled in the rope of the cinch cord, and landed squarely on her head. She sat on the ground under the trailer looking quite betrayed, and questioning about us all the things we were questioning about ourselves.
She slept in the hole where the table was the rest of the trip.
Downtown Sioux Falls has this vintage vibe, lots of crumbling buildings left as historical markers, a train yard, an airport, and a river running through it.
This family loves water.
This is our kind of place. There is a large sign at the river that tells parents to take responsibility for their own kids. Kids can get hurt here, so let them play, but know their abilities and if they get hurt, deal with it. At first, it is hard to process that this means that kids can play in the river. There are no rails or chains or barriers. People can go into this river. Right there in the middle of this big city. What magical place is this?
The buildings along this stretch of the river are the remnants of an old wheat mill. The mill had many stories, and each level took wheat from its original form a bit further toward flour. I imagine all the settlers that did not die because of the jobs provided by the mill. It must have been hard work, and sometimes dangerous. The mill would have been cold as the winter approached, and likely workers had to leave their families on farms on the prairie to work at the mill. These ruins are just a tiny bit of how the personal character and hardy attitude marking this area were developed.
The kids found some animals in the river, much to their delight. Sunshine found Tamagotchi in her pile of presents.
So we like Sioux City. When we took a poll earlier in the trip, we were somewhat split in our leanings between East and West side of the state. Now we are basically all in love with the East side.
We finished off Sunshine’s birthday with dinner at Cracker Barrel. This may have been their first time there. After dinner we sat on the front “porch” of the restaurant in those big rocking chairs, like weird tourists, and enjoyed the comfortable warmth of the evening.
We are ready to begin our trip home tomorrow. None of us wants to leave.
Happy Birthday, Sunshine!
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