My situation right now is very busy. I've had to pack up all of my Santa gear (hence me taking the past few months to film everything because I knew this was going to happen), build a box structure on two different trailers, get a tow hitch installed on our Malibu (fingers crossed we make it to Texas), pack up the rest of the house, and am currently in my final semester at college.
Midst all this we are growing larger as a family this month.
It's my goal to post as often and regularly as I can here on this platform. My current circumstances don't allow me to make more video content until we are settled in Texas (don't worry, this is a long-term website and I intend to make a new season annually), but I don't want that to hinder me reaching out and letting you all know what ol' Santa Stuart has been up to.
As such, I try to schedule these blogs in advance so I'm not scrambling at the last minute to get this up on Friday morning. There's a good chance that by the time you read this I'll have already witnessed another little one joining us here on Earth.
With both this one and our last we swore we were getting girls. I have nothing against girls. In fact, I was raised by two sisters and a mother. My father having passed a month before my 4th birthday, I was the lone "man of the house." And though it was fun at times to be the man, it also resulted in a lot of lonesome teasing and "responsibilities" I didn't want. No one wants the job of taking care of pesky insects. I'm looking at you spiders.
As lonely as I was, I prayed for a brother, for my father to come back from wherever he had gone off to, for some fellow male to enter into my life and love me. My mother got remarried a few times, but I'm sad to say they weren't the kind of men they led us to believe they were. They happily left us worse than they'd found us, and they better than we had found them, financially speaking.
I remember, many years before my widowed mother began dating again, that I sat down with my mother and told her my frustrations. I was extremely upset because even the dolls that my sisters played with were female. I wanted a brother of some kind, or even a baby doll, something that was a boy. I just wanted to feel included and secure in my gender.
My mother dug into her closet (for we had been sitting on her bed) and came back with a blue box with a boy baby doll in it. He had his own blue flannel washcloth, a blue bathrobe, a blue bottle, and was the most beautiful thing I had ever saw. Another boy at last!
Though I remember naming him what I did because it rhymed, my mother says I named him "Baby Maybe" because "maybe, mother would have another baby."
I had that doll for many years. I took him to grade-school (we used him as a football when recess was inside, tossing him back and forth), but eventually his existence faded to just a memory.
When my wife and I discovered the gender of our first child, I was in shock. On the video where we did a "gender reveal" I look so unsurprising. My disbelief was so great I wasn't prepared NOT to have a girl. It had been just me my whole life. Just me, surrounded by more "mothers" than I would have liked (don't get me wrong, sisters and one mother are great, but they all acted more like mothers which resulted in me never getting a break).
For our second one, the doctor put the result in an envelope. Though we had planned to open it together much later in the day, the rest of the appointment took a long time and I was left in the waiting room with our toddler. I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if I had this moment to myself," (selfish, I know!) "and get adjusted to the idea?"
So I read the paper and then stuffed it back in the envelope along with the photos. Now my mind began to spin. Me, an only boy with an only son and no father, was getting another boy. Another boy. ANOTHER BOY!
Well, my wife cried on the drive home when I told her I'd read it and that it was another boy (she had been calling the baby a "she" for the last two months).She read it herself and couldn't believe it, but the tears were tears of joy at finding out the news (and probably a bit of pregnancy hormones mixed in with the excitement for a lovely little cocktail there).
I will echo here what I said when we found out we were having a boy, and again repeated when I found out another one was on his way: "It looks like all those prayers I said as a boy to bring another boy into my life didn't go to waste, it just took the Lord a little longer to answer those prayers."
And He has given me more than I would have hoped for in posterity. God is good, and my life is great.
Yours as always,
Santa Stuart
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