Together Or Apart

4. Pregnancy Symptoms

Each time I come to my sisters place, something has changed. Usually it is something minor like a new ornament or the front door is painted a different colour. This time the large tree out the front is gone.

Now you can actually see the house from the bottom of the driveway. They live on property of 8 acres and their driveway is long as hell. That tree was beautiful, but blocked a lot of their views from the front of their house and it also did make a lot of mess.

Aaron would rant to me about it almost every time I spoke to him. His rants were very entertaining.

"Do you know where we are London?" I ask as I watch her through the revision mirror. She has a dinosaur in her hand and is tapping it's head with her finger.

"Tyde!" She shouts, throwing his dinosaur onto the floor. "Oops" she looks down at the dinosaur and tries to reach for it but she is in her booster seat so there is no way that she will be able to get the dinosaur.

I lean backwards and stretch my arm out, feeling around on the floor for the dinosaur. "That's right, Tyde's house. And Tori's, Aunty Rachel's and Uncle Aaron's." I pick up the dinosaur and give it to London and she grabs it. "What do you say?"

"Thank you mummy."

I smile at her and let go of the dinosaur. "Good girl using your manners."

Sydney is asleep so I get her out of her chair and hold her so she can still sleep while I clipping London seatbelt and she jumps out of her chair.

London runs up the driveway and calls out to Tyde who is nowhere in sight.

"London slow down. Wait for me." I grab out Sydney's baby bag and throw it over my shoulder while keeping my eye on London. She doesn't stop running. Relief washes through me when Aaron appears at the top of the driveway and bends down to pick London up. He gives her a hug and engages in conversation with her while I lock the car.

When I get to the top of the driveway, I hug Aaron and he kisses my cheek. "Hey, what happened to the tree?"

After our embrace he looks at me with a shake of his head. "Hailey, you have no idea how awful I feel."

"What happened?"

"I got it chopped down." He sighs. "One of my clients dropped off their car and forgot to pull the hand break up. The car rolled down the hill and we're actually lucky that the tree stopped it because it could have hurt someone if they were walking by."

I gasp because I was not expecting to hear that. Sure I am forgetful, but forgetting to pull the hand break up on the car? Were they too busy imagining Zac Efron shirtless or something?

"The tree got badly damaged but it was huge, as you know. So we had the decision to keep the tree there but risk it blowing over when we get a storm or huge gust of wind; or we could chop it down."

I put my hand on Aaron's shoulder. "I know keeping trees around is best for the environment but you made the right decision because what if your kids were playing out here one day and it fell on them."

Aaron nods. "That is exactly why I made the decision to chop it down. Rachel was all for it but you know me, I am earthy guy who has a soft spot for the environment."

"You do. I remember the first night we met you were telling me all these geographical facts. I hated geography in school but what you told me I was actually interested in."

Aaron laughs "you were the only person that listened to me without pulling out their Nintendo DS." Those were the technology obsession back in my day. DS, Nintendo Wii, Tamagotchi's and Gameboys. But I was never into gameboys, my male friends were though.