Only in my books

I think it’s going to be a long time before there’s another baby in my life. Both boys of my daughter who’s a nurse are in their twenties. The older one and his wife said they’re in no hurry to start a family. They’re happy with their careers. My younger skipped college when he graduated from high school, joined the marines, and is only starting college now. My second daughter in Florida and her husband sent us a picture of their dog and told us it was the only grand anything to expect from them. LOL. And that’s fine.

When HH and I got married, though, he wanted to start a family right away. Me? Not so much. I’d started teaching and loved it. I had enough kids in my classroom every day, and some of them showed up on our front porch steps on the weekends. I could wait to have a kid of my own. First, we waited until I got my Master’s degree. Then we waited for me to sign my fifth contract and get tenure. And then, I signed my sixth contract to get my life license. None of it did me any good, because Indiana changed its laws for teaching, and after I stayed home with my girls until they started school, and then wanted to go back, no one would hire me or anyone with a Masters because they had to pay us more. Go figure. But I made Ansel like HH when he and Jazzi got married, wanting to start a family as soon as possible. Like HH, though, he respects her wishes, so they put it off for a while.

At the end of book 7, The Body in the Trench, Jazzi tells Ansel she’s ready. And he’s excited. So excited, he did what HH did. Jazzi woke up every morning to have a thermometer pushed under her tongue. HH kept a chart for the optimum times to get pregnant. And when I finally did test positive, he could finally relax. But that’s where the comparison ends. In book 8, when Jazzi tells Ansel the good news, he’s ecstatic and wants to swaddle her and protect her. She has to fight to be able to keep working on the fixer-upper with him.

My daughter read the first fifty pages of the new book and complained. “I think Ansel would want to tell the world right away. He’d want to choose names and go out to buy baby furniture. He’d get a little crazy.”

She was right, but that’s not the way it happened for me, so that’s not the way I wrote it at first. HH was so sure I was healthy and fine, he didn’t fuss over me much at all. As a matter of fact, when I had our baby, (like any good Hoosier), it was March madness, so HH stayed home the first night to watch his favorite team play. Thankfully, they lost, or I might not have seen him until it was time for him to pick me up. LOL. We both lived through it, but it was dicier for him:)

Anyway, having Jazzi and Ansel start a family brought back lots of memories for me. Like me, Jazzi never gets morning sickness. The bigger she gets, the better she feels. She hasn’t started to show in this book. I’ll worry about that in the next one. And I’ll have to worry about what she can and can’t do, too. But my doctor let me do quite a bit. I was hanging wallpaper when my labor pains started. I have lots to look forward to in book 9.