Dominating Love ✓

[Epilogue]

Epilogue [Yes, it's really the end]
Chase's Pov

The journey we've been through had been the best experience of our lives. When I had to go back to work it almost killed me; I didn't know how Riley did it. Brylee came back to work after a few months but it was never like it had been before.

Sure we had a wonderful nanny who loved kids. As they started growing closer to a year old you could tell they liked her too. Knowing there was a great person with them didn't change that we missed them. Brylee started sinking into postpartum when she had to go back to work.

There were a lot of challenges we had to face being new parents but our friends and family assured us that we were doing just fine.

On their first birthday we invited everyone over. The twins were waddling around and Brylee and I couldn't have been more proud. Those two were going to be just like Brylee and Riley. When one was upset, the other helped to soothe their twin. When Maria started walking first she always wanted to be around to help and encourage Markus to take those steps.

That little girl was going to be fearless just like her mother and her grandmother. There was so much that little Maria was already showing that reminded me of her grandmother; it helped that Brylee took after her mother too.

The other nightmare we were going to face was the three M's: Michael, Miguel and Markus. There was a little gap between them but all the boys stuck together where Maria gravitated towards Bethany who was just starting to learn to walk too, Beth loved to walk around with help but hadn't quite gotten it on her own.

Those two were going to be more trouble than their mothers; I guarantee it.

Everything has changed in a year since we had them and not only did they learn something new every day, but we learned it too. Sometimes it was something about ourselves. Other times it seemed like we were learning every single thing a child could fall on or run into.

The first time Maria walked right into the coffee table I thought she was going to suddenly fall down and die or something. We were still learning how to be good parents without constantly hovering and babying them; which was hard since they were our babies still.

No one will fully be able to understand the amount of times I've heard the words 'kids fall down'. Were you a bad parent for letting them cry? But you were a bad parent for not just picking them up. You didn't care if you let them cry when they fell down until they realize that 'oh, maybe I'm not hurt'. But you weren't teaching them to handle things on their own or that it was okay to fall if you let them cry.

We could never win.

My mother told me that she let me cry all I damn well wanted when she knew I was fine. She also said that if someone picked me up and cuddled me when I fell then I would cry louder and think I was seriously hurt. She said that when I was three I would run around, despite being told not to, and that I ran and smacked my head on the table and she just looked at me.

She asked if it hurt and when I nodded with tears in my eyes she asked if I would do it again. I had shook my head and ran right back into that table ten minutes later because I was, once again, running in the house.

Situation by situation and day by day we were adapting our parenting style and our kids were healthy and fine; no broken bones and the bumps from falling never lasted long. You would think that in a large crowd the kids would keep close. Maria and Markus were walking around carefully and slowly as well as asking people to pick them up. They were incredibly social.

Before cake we put then both down for a nap and some other parents took the opportunity to do the same. In a year a lot has changed. Monica was pregnant now and she had made a hard decision; she wasn't going back to work. She wanted to have two more in a few years and they would be finished ptobably by the time Miguel was going to school.