Maia soon found out that she had gotten pregnant from her elevator
woohoo with Mickey at the movie theater.
She was glad about it of course, but she didn’t feel that
same thrill that she normally did when she discovered she was expecting. And all the recriminations and self-loathing
she heaped upon herself for feeling such little excitement about the new life she
had helped create did not help matters any.
The only thing that kept her from feeling any lower than she
already did was keeping busy, so Zak becoming an active toddler gave her a
reprieve from those negative emotions.
Zak was a fast learner and Maia was able to teach him his
skills quickly and easily.
Too quickly.
Maia chafed under the restrictions of her maternity leave,
feeling listless without a job to go to or many household tasks to keep her
occupied. There were only so many meals
she could prepare ahead of time, only so many plants needing weeding and
harvesting, and only so many metamorphium potions she could create in advance for
her children’s IFs.
Most of the time, while the older children were in school,
she sat in the nursery rocking chair with Zak while mindlessly watching TV and
listening to the radio for company as she waited for the restrictive feeling
that her pregnancy brought her to end.
Maia was relieved to go into labor at last. She set Zak down to play with his IF Jester
and left the teens to babysit while she called Mickey and then headed to the
hospital.
And when Mickey and Maia emerged from the hospital, it was
as the new parents of quadruplets!
Welcome Elise, Chloe, Brielle and Ian!
Taking care of the four infants was a full time job in and
of itself, and with all of them on different feeding and sleeping schedules
plus caring for toddler Zak, Maia had little time for anything else.
It was only later that she became aware of the fact that Ian
was her fiftieth baby—she was halfway through her challenge! She had given
birth to fifty children which was a major milestone, but one that also meant
that she still had fifty more to go before she finally finished. She felt that
she had barely made it this far; how could she bear all the years that still
remained, alone? The glass that was half full was equally half empty...
And shortly afterwards Maia was stunned again as she realized
that the birthdays of her twins and their IFs had already arrived!
Happy birthday Tesla!
Happy birthday Pascal!
Happy birthday Winks!
Happy birthday Blinks!
At the end of their party, Maia expressed to Isak how awful
she felt that she knew practically nothing about their grown children—what
their interests were or their plans for the future—because her daily interactions
with them had been half-hearted at best.
She had been so focused on keeping herself busy progressing in her job and
having children for her challenge so as not to think about Reid... her only
real comfort was in knowing that at least Isak had been there for them as a
father as they grew.
Maia wasn’t certain what she expected Isak to say, but he
neither consoled nor criticized her. He simply asked, “So what are you going to
do about it?”
Maia didn’t know, but she needed to try to make it right.
She realized that in shutting off all her negative emotions, she had inadvertently
become disengaged from her family, which in turn not only made her feel even
more alone, but also made her miss out on so much of their lives. She wanted to fix things, and just by having
that motivation, that battle was half won.
So Maia spent the time rebuilding her relationships with her
grown children.
She discovered that Tesla was a bot fan and had begun to
learn how to design trait chips and reverse engineer nanites for bot-building like
her father.
Winks had a flirty nature, which gave her plenty of writing
material to work with for her future romance novels.
Maia learned that Pascal had his unstable moments, but he
had also inherited Isak’s handiness. Working on that skill helped to steady him
and improve his focus.
And she found out that Blinks had dreams of starting a huge
science-fiction inspired town for travelers those who wanted the immersive
experience of a futuristic-themed vacation. He was thinking of calling it Oasis
Landing.
By the time graduation day rolled around, Maia finally felt
like she knew her kids much better than before. She was proud that they all
graduated with highest honors and that Winks was named class valedictorian.
And when she hugged them goodbye, her regrets weren’t nearly
as bad as they easily could’ve been.
But Maia didn’t stop there.
She didn’t want to do her job as a parent by halves ever again, so she
made her children the focus of her daily life as they should've been all along. So she worked
on learning more about her triplets and their interests.
Phineas was into sports.
And when he wasn’t playing games of b-ball or attending
sporting events at the stadium, he was reading books about them. He’d even begun to write his own sports
stories.
Sibyl loved to be outside and often collected things on her little
jaunts around the neighborhood. At first
it was flowers that she gathered.
And later, once she joined the after-school geology club, Sibyl
started collecting shiny rocks—the sparkly ones were her favorites.
Cassandra enjoyed baking desserts using the little toy oven,
and she was always looking for fresh ingredients from Maia’s garden for her
latest recipes.
Since she wasn’t skilled at gardening yet, Maia planted her
fairy daughter a cocoa bean bush of her very own, and Cassandra talked to it
every day. “Go, cocoa, grow! You’ll make
beautiful chocolate chip cookies someday!”
When it came time for the triplets to become teens, Maia was
able to celebrate it without reservations.
Happy birthday Phineas!
Happy birthday Sibyl!
Happy birthday Cassandra!
Afterwards, the triplet teens made Rune, Crystal and Cookie real.
And that meant that Maia now had six teenagers begging to
learn how to drive...
