A new parental milestone: the first time we got served breakfast in bed! We found it easy, apparently, to fall back into our old routine of going to bed WAY too late back at home. So when 7:30 rolled around (yippee, actually - this is a lot later than they'll be able to get up come Monday) both the bug and the fox were up immediately. Sawyer had woken up at 5:30 but had gone back to sleep and was in Jordan's bed, Jordan was in our bed, and I was in her bed with Sawyer (yes, some nights we do play musical beds, don't you?) We all crawled back into the parental bed, and when Sawyer continued to cajole us to "Wake up! Wake uuuuup!", I said, "Why don't you guys go make your papa coffee in bed?" Jordan said, after a pause, "But, Mama, I don't know how to do that yet." So, I mentally amended the list of New Year's resolutions, and suggested they make us breakfast in bed instead. Same answer. I didn't say anything, I was still caught up in the fantasy of coffee being brought to me in bed. So when they brought us, a few minutes later, two brimming full bowls of dry oatmeal, imagine my delight (true, actually. Aided by my imagining it was a steaming mug full of hot coffee).

Now it's three days later and we've had an eventful night mixed in with the drive back toward our regular sleep schedule - Jordan got very sick, we think food poisoning. And very sick for Jordan isn't really all that bad: she threw up (horribly and violently, preceded by even worse uncontrollable sobbing) at about 10:00pm, and another few times before falling asleep finally for the night at 1:30am. Her experience two months earlier with the stomach flu had been much worse, a long night of vomiting every five minutes until dawn, Sawyer doing the same thing in our bed with Tom. Musical beds for other reasons, mainly the changing of sheets. It's easy, though, in the morning when it's clear that they're on the mend to laugh about it, to hold them close and wish it would never happen again but to count your lucky stars that it's an unusual experience, not a way of life or a step in a long decline.

A few hours later I was on the phone with my twin sister who had changed her sheets as well, her husband, however, was the sick one, and there wasn't any laughter or relief in her voice recounting the episode. Her husband has terminal cancer and it's been a few years of an unbelievable battle on their part - one that has precluded any attempts at having children or planning for a future beyond the next few hours, days, weeks or at most months. I want for my family my acts of faith in the future to be regularly making deposits into my kids college plans, not making flight reservations for two months down the line. But it has forced the realization that everything is an act of faith in this world. Marriage, having children the grandest displays of all. Not faith that it will all turn out alright, but faith that you'll endure, I suppose. Faith that your heart will survive the potential for loss that comes with all that love.

When people ask what it's like having a twin, the only thing that is really different now, in my adult life, is to have someone who IS me genetically living a life so different from mine. We have always felt like different people, haven't ever had strange feelings of not being whole if we're not with the other, but we are identical twins so I can look at her life and see myself in it, see how things take strange twists, how we can't plan for everything in life.

We're trying to decide whether to have a third child or not right now. We have two gorgeous children who are, so far, incredibly healthy. It feels like a monumental roll of the dice to me. It's been an especially hard year with friends and children of friends and parents of friends going through terrible illness and suffering. Way, way too much death this year and it's felt like very few victories. Amazingly most everyone around us has endured, most still seem to have faith identifiable by just the ability to look forward, to move on, to continue to risk loving the people in their lives regardless of the capacity for loss that creates in them. This thought, of having another child, just by it's presence puts us in a precarious relationship with faith: if we choose to try again, that is one kind of faith, by not choosing to embrace hope and try are we not embracing faith or are we holding on ever more tightly to the possibility of what we've already created?

A part of me wants to have ten more children, put that much more love into this world - but again, there's that mirrored potential for loss, for illness, for things to move away from the joy so abundant now in our lives. But it is that much more love. And maybe that next kid will be the one who knows how to make coffee at 6:30 in the morning. Or how to cure cancer. Or how, like they all do, to give the most unbelievable hugs that help lessen the pain of the loss and add power to the faith that still remains.