Mothers Day

Kaylee Elizabeth Stumbaugh expressed just a little displeasure at having to
change her shirt, letting out a few moans of objection as her mother, Susan,
maneuvered her out of her clothes.

She was doing better than the newborn a few rooms over, whose cries could be heard through the walls of West Suburban Hospital’s birthing center, even with the door to Stumbaugh’s room closed.

“It’s amazing what a production putting a shirt on is,” Susan Stumbaugh said, gently lifting her day-old daughter, slipping the shirt under the baby so she could slide another arm into a sleeve.

“Next winter, it will be a shirt, a sweater, coat, mittens and a hat,” her husband, Brandon Stumbaugh, chimed in. He sat on the same chair he had slept on while his wife was at the hospital.

“Hopefully, by next winter, she’ll let me move her arms,” she replied. With her shirt on, Kaylee crooned a little as her mother wrapped her in a fresh blanket, clean of spit-up. “OK,” Susan Stumbaugh said, picking up her daughter. “OK.”

Susan and Brandon Stumbaugh officially became parents at 1:30 a.m. May 2. This weekend will be Susan’s first Mother’s Day. The feeling, she said, is incredible.

“I just laid awake all night last night staring at her thinking, wow, she’s here,” she said.

It’s perfect timing, really.

The Stumbaughs wanted to wait until Susan had finished her master’s degree in library and information sciences before having children. She had just two more pages to write for her last term paper, due at 6 p.m. Wednesday night. Her laptop was open and running next to her hospital bed, her research lying on the table next to it. She knew how to finish the paper. It was just a matter of doing it.

“It’s really hard when you have the baby, even when you know exactly what you’re going to write,” she said.

-Chris LaFortune