A gift shop = 2 children?

I had a work trip out in Arizona in the winter of 2008. John was always good about bringing me home gifts from work trips and I wanted to do the same for him, but before I knew it, two days had passed and I hadn’t had a chance to leave the hotel due to all day conferences. So, there I found myself in the hotel gift shop trying to make something work five minutes before the hotel shuttle would take me to the airport. I found a figurine that looked a lot like something John would like – it was a funky metal sculpture of a person dancing on a stone. I brought it back for him and it stayed on the coffee table in our family room downstairs (I promise this odd beginning is going somewhere).

More than a year later, with 3-month-old twins taking a much-welcomed nap, I started dusting the furniture downstairs and noticed the figurine was gone from the coffee table. I found John upstairs a little while later and in passing, asked if he knew where it was.

“I don’t know,” he said at first.

“Really? Odd,” I said. But for some reason I couldn’t drop it. I mean come on. Here I’d so thoughtfully purchased the gift from the hotel gift shop and all. “You don’t have any clue what happened to it?”

“Actually, I do. It’s gone.”

 “Gone?” I asked.             

“Yes. It’s gone,” he repeated.

“Well, did it break or something?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, what happened?”

“It was a fertility statue.”

“A fertility statue? Shut up!”

“I’m serious.”

“I bought you a fertility statue?” I said, trying not to laugh. Oh my God. I’d bought him a fertility statue. Okay, for a couple that had, at the time, just moved in together, that was a seriously creepy gift. “Oh my God. Were you totally weirded out by me when I gave that to you?!”

“No – I didn’t see the label until a few weeks ago when I was cleaning. There was a sticker on the bottom.”

“Wow.” I said.

There wasn’t a need to talk about what we were both thinking. I’d bought the statue in the winter of 2008. By the beginning of June, we knew we were having twins. That was one powerful statue.

 “So, you weren’t really feeling more kids, huh?” I smiled. (Again, we love, love, love our fellas, but we’re done with two – partly because I don’t think it’s safe for me to fill the world with children that have inherited my crazy thought process, and partly because I’m not so sure our wallets ― or our sanity ― could have more than two).

“I threw it in the trash immediately.”

I nodded.

Well. That answered that.

Until tomorrow …