jack is five!

i had very good intentions of doing this post on friday, but in true "mother" fashion, what i wanted to do got pushed back behind other people's wants and needs and now it is 12:30 am tuesday morning and i am finally getting to it. this is my combination mother's day/jack's birthday post. you see, five years ago on mother's day, i gave birth to john sterling. i think that maybe the fact that he was born on mother's day gives him a little edge. jack is my middle son...he's not my first born that had all of the attention for 4+ years, he's not my baby boy (who really is about the prettiest child i have ever seen) and he's not one of the twin girls, so he needed a little edge there to avoid being lost in the shuffle.

jack is the only child that i went to my due date with. by may 9th, 2004 i had pretty much decided i was done being pregnant, so my mother-in-law took me to the cherry hill mall, which we walked FOR HOURS, in the hopes of inducing labor and buying about $140 worth of baby girl clothes from gymboree (we were convinced that this was a girl, you see). by the time we got home from the mall, i was crazy uncomfortable and crampy. i called my midwife and she told me to go get checked out (i'm sure she said this out of pity, not because she thought i was actually going to have the baby). when i got there, all the nurses assumed i was getting sent home, but the doctor that gave me the (most painful ever) internal said that my water broke, and voila...i was allowed to stay!

at this point i was given my antibiotics (group b strep + for the last three pregnancies) and my epidural and settled in for the night. i clearly remember that there was a woman screaming bloody murder down the hall, while tommy and i watched snoop dog on letterman or leno (i can't remember which one, i just know it was snoop) and laughed our asses off. anyone that went by our room must have thought we were insane. i labored peacefully through the night (love a good epidural!) and around 8:30 am, my midwife checked me out and determined we were read to go. she said she wanted to see me push just once, to see how i was at it and then we would see if she would deliver me or her other patient first. apparently, i am a REALLY good pusher, as she told me not to do anything else until she was able to get her gown on and get scrubbed up (as an aside...my mom was really good at labor and delivery too. she thinks that our ancestors were the kind of women who gave birth in potato fields and then went back to work. lucky me). i pushed about three times and my baby boy was delivered. WHAT?!?! i thought i was having a girl! didn't matter...john sterling was born at 9:45 am on mother's day morning. how's that for a gift? (by the way...the other girl who was ready at the same time as me didn't deliver until around 3pm.)

jack was my biggest baby at about 7 lbs. 10 oz. he was a pretty tough baby, too with his "jack attacks," fits during which he just screamed uncontrollably for no apparent reason. but he is also my most affectionate baby and he's really funny. thomas was always pretty funny, but not intentionally. jack is funny to make people laugh. he is crazy lovable, even though he is also crazy stubborn. in september of this year (our first attempt at preschool which was NOT successful) he told us that he quit school and haircuts. he also compared his "package" to the eiffel tower before. he's just a funny kid.

as far as appearance goes, jack looks nothing like me at all. he is my husband's spitting image, but he is my total mama's boy. he's my baby. and he is, quite literally, a gift (they all are, but he gets props now for his birthday).

i've included some of my favorite pictures of him, including one of the day we brought him home from the hospital.