Spencer and Tegan’s birthdays are 3 days apart.  Well, 11 years and 3 days.  In the past, I’ve found that stressful, because 1)  I find birthdays a little bit stressful to begin with, and 2) it meant twice as much planning, twice as much baking, twice as much money….

This year though, I realized for the first time how incredibly fitting it is that we get to celebrate them both in the same week:  Spencer, the one who made us a mother and a father.  The one who took us from just a couple to a family.  The one who taught us what it meant to love another person so completely, so intensely, so ferociously.  The one who showed us what we wanted to do and who we wanted to be as parents.  The one who brought us more joy, more heartbreak, and more pride than we’d ever experienced before.  The one who forged the way for his three younger siblings, and the one who continues to lead the way with courage and passion and tenacity.   When Spencer was born, we ceased to be who we’d been before, and we became something entirely new… something brighter, and something stronger.

And Tegan, the one who completed our family.  The one who showed us the new joys and experiences of having a girl after three boys.  The girl we never knew we always wanted.  The one who almost wasn’t.  The one who made her presence so strongly known even before she was conceived.  The one who made me know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that someone was still missing from our family.  The one who made me sob to my husband, “You don’t understand.  If we don’t have another baby, I will regret it for the rest of my life.  Someone is STILL MISSING.”  The one who continues to teach me so much about love, about life, and about myself.  The one who reminds me to play, to smile, and to live every moment as if it were my last.  The one who has brought us so much joy and laughter in five short years.    So much joy!

The one who started our little family, and the one who completed it.

Our engine and our caboose.

I love them both more than words could ever adequately express, and I thank God every day that I’m lucky enough to be their mom.