{pretty, happy, funny, real}

The lovely ladies at Like Mother Like Daughter are having a little linky get-together, asking all us moms to capture the contentment of everyday life in photos. And you know it takes absolutely zero encouragement to get me to share photos. So here are more babymoon shots.

Keeping it real: Anthony has only had one sponge bath since coming home from the hospital. Time to wash the baby!

Can you believe Anthony will be 8 weeks old on Sunday? On Saturday he’ll be received into the church, no more pagan baby. (How tempted have I been to sprinkle a little holy water on his head every time we go to Mass? But baptisms are about community as well as about grace so we want our friends and family to come celebrate the sacrament with us. )

I meant to go take some pictures of flowers. Or of the house. It’s looking fabulous now with my dad making all sorts of improvements while he’s visiting from Texas. Yesterday and today he’s painting my bedroom. A lovely shade of very pale blue or very bluish white called something like Diamond Haze. So fresh and clean.

The baby is a bit blurry, but you can see the crisp blue and white stripes on the comforter cover and the towering pile of books on our “to be read” shelf. That’s what you notice, right?

The people who fixed this house before we bought it painted everything in a drab yellowish-beige flat paint that is impossible to clean. It looks rather like what white might look like after a smoker had been staining the room with smoke for a decade or so. And did I mention that any attempt to clean hand prints or crayon or marker or shoe prints or dings caused by the movers way back when they were putting in the furniture are IMPOSSIBLE to clean off because as soon as you try to scrub the paint just starts coming off on your rag and it leaves a darker nasty streak on the wall?

Sweet sleepy boy!

So now the living room is a cheery pale yellow and the bathroom has crisp white cabinets and a warm pearly color on the walls and a nice sage under the chair rail. Oh yes all the new paint is inspiring me to want to clean and declutter and make this place more homey.

He meets your gaze so intently. And smiles so warmly!

But none of that is on my camera. What is on my camera are a bunch of baby pictures. And let’s be honest, you’d rather see those here anyway.

Brothers.

He’s smiling at me and laughing. Chortling and cooing. And his siblings fight over the chance to hold him.

“Hug Nie. Touch Nie.”

Ben is really enchanted with his baby brother. His face just beams when he gets up close, when you let him hug or hold or touch.

Note that dirty wall behind the changing table before the fresh coat of paint.

Oh the love! Oh what a thing it is to see these boys, brothers, my sons, together.

Happy beaming big brother.

And Sophie and Bella too.

Ben calls them “Dophie” and “Nie”.

Each time we welcome a new baby the amount of love in this house increases exponentially. It reminds me again of what Scott Hahn said in a talk Dom and I attended when we were engaged. Talking of how God is a family, three persons in a relation of love—and how human families image that divine love—he said that the love of a husband and wife is so real it has to be given a name, it becomes a person. Our love has five names: Isabella, Francis, Sophia, Benedict, Anthony.

Sophie and Ben

So there you have it. No pictures of the mess of toys or the sun shining on fresh paint. But this is my real. Three kids in diapers; but every diaper change is a chance to gaze into their eyes and tell them how much I love them. And to see their eyes shining back: how much they love me! And that makes me as happy as can be.