In the past few weeks I have awoken to tiny voices in the night, like ghost cries in the shower - echoes, faint, trailing. I have found myself dazed at one a.m., barefoot in the hallway, listening for a newborn. It’s nothing really, I tell myself. And I don’t want another baby. I’m not patient enough, miserable at pregnancy, and more times than not, painfully inadequate at handling the children I already have.

Yet I am so intrigued by three and the mother who can handle it. What is the magic she bares? The internal dose of pale blue calm she centers herself on again and again? How do I get that? Like Missy: freckled, perennially sunned, ageless. Unflappable. A workhorse: forever going, doing, making, creating. The kind of mom you want to buy hours off of. And, she has three. A breathtaking trio of pouty lips and cerulean eyes, porcelain skin and ink swept lashes. I photographed the baby, Lucy, last spring at four weeks, then this fall shot all three. They plopped in the grass, a rambling little river of girl, and had me. Had me thinking. Three. How very, very sweet. Perhaps.

Perhaps, but mostly, I remain scrambled, and in awe. Repeatedly scrolling through batches of photos like these, adding up the small, beautiful bodies – one, two, three. Searching big round baby eyes like Lucy’s hoping for an answer, or the courage to scrape together my own.