Feliz Cumpleanos Bella Grace!

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Bella is six! Learning to read, write, loving pink and purple, wanting to be a Kindergarten teacher when she grows up, growing up, indeed, too quickly. Not a morning person, a gal after my own heart, but off to school each morning and home at noon. She is always happy and an expert skipper and such unadulterated joy! Still remembers some of her Espanol from last year and hoping she keeps it up, even tho there is no instruction at her school. Her classroom is like a revolving door with kids coming and going often, the nature of this rural community where parenting has become a lost art. And did I mention she snores? Loudly, like her adenoids need removing, again.
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Her room is a disaster with Barbies and impossibly small and yet painful-when-stepped-on-barefoot Polly Pocket shoes and assorted miniature accessories spread everywhere. I send her in to clean and she plays for hours with entropy as her constant companion. Her clothes spill out of her hand painted drawers in various half-open yawns, or are they half-shut? She could easily fill her own yurt with her Barbie and stuffed animal collections. And this is after we have downsized more than I care to remember. I vacillate between ranting and raving my threats to give them all away and my propensity to clutch the entire collection to my chest, remembering the Christmas when Hannah got that Scuba Barbie with the chattering dolphin sidekick and Christiana her dark-haired familiar with a trained but silent sea lion. Scuba Ken joined in on the bathtime fun at some point. And now they are all growed up and saving China. Christiana can scuba dive all by herself, just like her childhood doll with the built-in wetsuit. We still have the miniature mask and snorkel - how can I possibly part with the likes of these? Ouch.
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Bella loves to snuggle and finds her way to my leg or lap wherever I land. She began in the summer of aught three and swam across the bay with me before I fully realized she was on board. She grew in utero, slowly asserting her presence as we settled into our Portugal life at Casa Mocho (House of Owls), nourished by the olives and pomegranates we picked from the trees and the pain au chocolate and fresh blood orange juice from the Intermarche market where Andy and I struggled with the language and the metric system to order Jamon y Queso, um kilo media we gestured because we couldn't speak any fraction besides a half or a whole and coming home with 2.2 pounds of ham only happens once. Bella was rocked to sleep as we walked daily on the sunny Algarve beaches after tucking the other four kids in school, digging our toes into the ochre sand backed by impossibly orange hills while old men raked for coquinas and ameijoas and the fishing boats perched precariously on nearshore waves to capture sardinhas to be grilled on sidewalks. We inhaled the incense of ancient churches and admired the beauty of the flowering almond trees, learning their legend before Bella began her own storied life. Isaiah and I flew west with the night across the stormy Atlantic while a nor'easter raged around our fragile fuselage, threatening to birth us all in the tumultuous cold sea, but landing happily in the darkness.
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Bella tread water confidently while my aging body struggled to nourish us both and keep us whole as I lay in the hospital for a month. She gave the doctors two thumbs up six weeks early to get things started, then did a belly flip in labor, deciding for us both that cutting a new bikini line would be her preferred exit strategy. She was so tiny, like 2.5 kilos of jamon, but perfect and beautiful with her almond-shaped blue eyes. She was cold in that snowy week of Valentine's Day so I stuck her under my night gown and kept her there, skin to skin, radiating the heat from our hearts beating in unison down to her perfect toes and fingers - ten of each, count them, Mimi used to instruct - while we dreamed together and woke to feed each other. When she was warm and pink enough, first passport clutched in her tiny fist, we returned to Portugal in March before even her April due date and surprised the kids in one of the most glorious afternoons of our family history. Bella met her sisters who adored her and counted her perfection by tens and beyond while their combined tears of joy fell on her soft cheeks and her brother memorized her with amazement. The hoopoes cried their delight and the wildflowers bloomed in greater profusion to welcome our Bella to the orange blossom air of her new home, the smallest Mocho in the casa.
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She is a huge blessing, our Bella Grace, the final Willa award lost, the exclamation point at the end of our family!
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Mommy loves you and Daddy does too!
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K3