n a s h *
Since my parents are required to travel a lot, I live with my sister, Julie, and her husband, Matt; she is 32, and he is 33. Julie and Matt have adopted four children, Victoria, who has a one-month-old son named Carson and is 17--she's been here since she was eight, Jaxon, who's sixteen and has been here since he was twelve, Hayden who is eleven and has been here since he was four, and Maison who is three and has been here since she was six months old. They're currently fostering two twin brothers, Jeremiah and Braxon who are nine, and Malaki, who is seventeen. I think, at least the last I heard, there's a girl named Anna that they're trying to be able to foster. Malaki got here around two and a half months ago, and the twins have been here for a little over four months.
Since Victoria, Jaxon, Hayden, and Maison have been here for so long, they call Matt and Julie 'Mom' and 'Dad' and me their uncle; also since they've been here for so long, they have the pictures of their names on their door that, when they were officially adopted, Julie made to make it feel more official to them.
"What are you reading today?" I ask Jaxon, knocking on his door first before stepping inside. He looks up from the book he's reading while sitting in his hanging chair. A thing to know about Jaxon is that he's a total bookworm, honestly a man after my own heart.
He smiles at me as he marks his place and closes the book. "Rereading Six of Crows," he says.
"Oh, that's a good one! You know there's now a book about Nikolai? It's going to be a duology." I say.
He nods. "Yeah, I just finished rereading the 'Shadow and Bone' trilogy, and I'm rereading Six of Crows before I read it," He points to the book on his shelf.
"I may have to borrow that," I say with a laugh.
He laughs, too. "Go right ahead,"
In the (sort-of) next room over, I hear Victoria shushing Carson.
"Please, please, it's okay, mama's right here, please go to sleep," I hear her pleading with him.
When Victoria got pregnant, her boyfriend, at the time, left her and she was terrified. She went straight to Julie, expecting the absolute worst, but Julie was the exact opposite. She was comforting and supportive.
"It's okay," Julie said. "We'll get through this,"
Once Carson was born, Victoria's ex-boyfriend tried to get back with her. She said he could see Carson, but she didn't want to get back together with him because of how he acted during her pregnancy, which is respectable.
Across the hall, I vaguely hear Hayden watching a baseball game on his TV. That kid is obsessed with baseball. He's on a little league team, but when we redid his room last year, he requested that it be baseball-themed, so that's what we did. For as long as I can remember, he's loved baseball. He was on the T-ball team as soon as he was old enough, and as soon as he met the age requirement for little league, not only was he begging to be on the team, but he also had several coaches after him to be on their team. We left it completely up to him as to which coach he chose.
Down the hallway, Maison is singing a song from a Disney movie. Cinderella has always been her favorite movie, so it was no surprise that she ran up to the first Cinderella thing she saw when we went to the design store to get ideas for her room re-design.
That evening for dinner, Matt grills out and we eat outside on the picnic table. It's a nice, warm summer evening. When I go back to school in the fall, I'll be in my senior year. A couple of kids are in the pool, a couple of others are playing on the swingset/playhouse, and the others are sitting on the grass or around the yard. But, of course, it doesn't last long, because Maison, in her little Cinderella bathing suit, comes from the swing set and demands to be pushed on the tire swing. I get off the grass and carry her over to the swing, lifting her up, putting her in it, and start swinging her until she has enough and runs to Julie.
"Mommy! Mommy! Water! Water!" she says, which is her way of saying, 'Put my floaties back on so I can swim'. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Malaki watching me.
