The Name

Only a few days before this adventure began, I was driving around town with BO alone. I remember getting back to the store and telling Christy how amazing and how amazingly different my two kids are. Their true personalities only come out when they are not together. If you find yourself alone in a car with Pierce, he will ask you a MILLION questions and you will be able to answer approximately three. When he was about three, he started with the electricity questions--what are those things on the wooden things, and where do they go and what do they do and how do they do it and why and why don't they use something else. Bo's biggest fear is kidnappers and we always tell him that as long as he is with Pierce, he is safe because as soon as someone picks them up, Pierce only has to be Piercey, meaning ask a million questions, and they will drop them back off in about ten minutes! But when you are alone with Bo, his sensitive existential side comes out. That day, he was so happy and he was marveling at how right now he is a kid, but one day he is going to be a grown up, and will it feel different, and then he will have kids, but will he still feel like a kid? He was so beautiful and so thoughtful and so happy, and every day since then I can't stop replaying that conversation. At first it made me happy, and now it makes me sad in a way I could never have imagined, and I can't help but wonder how much more sad a person can possibly be.

And so the name of the blog. Lara understood immediately. It was pronounced thatamuch, one word. A Bo-ism most often used when he got the point of domestic semi-independence. "Thatamuch kepuch, mama?" was the most common usage, as Bo used to like ketchup on everything. But it also meant that's enough, as in "thatamuch PIERCE" meaning "stop whatever you are doing to me!" And as I lie in bed in the hospital on the night I started this blog, before we knew the whole travel plan, all I could think was "please god, thatamuch."

But we can do this, I said in my last post that I believe, and we have told Bo repeatedly, that god only picks special people to face the biggest challenges because he knows they can handle it. He picked Johnny and his poor mother, he picked Mike so that he can be a role model for Bo, and so, there is a reason he picked Bo, and even though we may never know why, he picked us. So I will keep asking "thatamuch" and hoping we get more dessert and fewer lima beans, but we will make the best of what we have and make all the happiness we can while we can. With love, Lisa