Josh and Becca Thrap and Family

Ten years ago I welcomed Josh’s grandma Jean to our green house in Muscatine. She arrived around 10 am and we went to Wal-Mart with little Jacob in tow. While picking up groceries for the next few days I became very aware of the recurring tightening of my very pregnant belly. That evening, back at home–Josh now home from work at the bank, we had spaghetti and garlic bread for dinner. Kate came to visit and while grandma Jean helped put Jacob to bed, Kate started keeping a written log of the frequency and intensity of my contractions, hoping to convince me to let her take me to the hospital. Around 11 pm I finally decided that if I wasn’t going to the hospital yet then I’d better try and get some sleep. About 1:30 am I woke to snowfall and knew that I’d better get a move on and I worried that the late hour and slick roads might be a bad combination for Josh to drive after only about an hour of sleep so I called my dad and he rushed us both up to the Quad Cities while grandma stayed behind with sleeping Jacob. After hours in a non-room waiting for a vacancy we finally got rolled into a room around 4am. Sparing all the more graphic details, by 4:35 the pain of labor gave way to an overwhelming experience that I have heard others describe as a glimpse of Heaven. A beautiful baby girl now resting on my chest, pain replaced with a feeling of softness, the glaring lights in the room now a kind of ethereal glow, the sweetest smell filled the room the like I have never been able to describe. From this heavenly sweet place she came to us and quickly the chaos of life restored, screaming baby, noisy nurses, messy dressings, hospital sights and sounds. But that moment of heaven is the memory that stays with me, and so has it been raising Elise. Chaos peppered with moments of sheer bliss. Anger, and joy. Frustration, and enlightenment. It’s hard to believe its been ten whole years. And so, we are celebrating the birthday of our daughter Elise–beautiful, smart, thoughtful, aggravating, generous, creative, talkative, willful, loyal, persistant, great-big baby girl Elise.
Now, anyone who knows Elise at all these days must know of her great infatuation with wolves. They have become the focus of many of her school papers, research, fiction, and illustration, the main characters in the books she reads and the games she plays, graphics on the clothes she wears and stuffed toy companions lining her bed frame. She gets so excited about wolves that she has convinced the other children how cool they are! So, when Josh and I learned that the shopping mall nearby had live wolves that you could see and pet (2 Timberwolves, an Arctic Wolf, and a baby Cougar), well, we knew just what to do for Elise’s birthday!

She didn’t love that they were caged, and perhaps being face to face with them made the reality that she herself was in fact NOT a wolf more obvious, but she said she enjoyed the experience.