The baby sister

"Mom" pencil sketch

What is your favorite Autumn memory?

In my family all of us kids are born within a two-week time span between the end of September and the middle of October.  The year my little sister was born my parents took their remaining three children over to a neighbors while my mother was in the hospital.  Funny how I don’t remember the neighbor but I do remember the paper plates we used to color and create pumpkins.

Those were the days before the creepy looking, super realistic ultrasounds.  They were even before the old sonograms where you had to just take the technician’s word for it.  It was the days of predictions by everyone from the hairdresser who just knew that the baby would be a boy since you were carrying so low, to the doctor who made his assumptions from the kicking.  I didn’t know whether my new sibling would be yet another boy, or the little sister I was wishing for. 

The first thing my mother did when she got home was to set the new arrival wrapped in a pink receiving blanket, in my lap.  There I was, the proud six-year-old big sister sitting on the couch with a newborn baby cradled in my lap while relatives chided my mother for allowing a “child” to hold a newborn. 

“She’s going to drop her.” They moaned.

And my mother just smiled.