Younger Siblings

When we were close to Spencer's due date, my dad joked about how he couldn't wait to see if we took as many photos of Spencer as we did of Kenzie.

Classic 2nd kid syndrome.

I told him, we had every intention of taking just as many. After all, both Dan and I are younger siblings. Both of us have older sisters. Both of whom happen to have red hair.

Dan and I know firsthand the good and bad associated with being the baby. We joked that we had more in common with Spencer than Kenzie, right off the bat.

Especially Dan. He was 21mos younger than his sister. Spencer was 18mos younger than Kenzie. He understood.

Yet another point of excitement that is now an empty space in our family.

All we can do is know we took as many photos of Spencer as we could. We wish there were millions more. We wish we hadn't thought about how all his tubes looked, and just took the picture anyway. I wish I had even a handful more photos of him without the feeding tube or other 'giveaways' as to his status. We wish we had gone so overboard with photos that our phones ran out of space.

We wish we could go back and take a million a day- not caring what we or he looked like.

I wish I wasn't already grasping for new photos to put on the blog so it didn't seem like we didn't care. We cared. We just spent far more time holding him than our phones.

I wish I could go back. Hold him and take millions of photos.

But wishes can only do so much. I will forever only have the photos I have. No more. No less.

It was not for his position as the younger sibling, it was simply the best we could do in 6 weeks, surrounded by machines, tubes and uncertainty.

Now..Now our family photos are ones that show all of us, and our memorials to him.