That day was one full of dreams for their future.
Their daughter was almost two years old when they were given the news that she was pregnant again. At first, both were shocked. Their daughter had already been a miracle, yet another one was coming.
"Are you that powerful?" Judd had asked his little buddy back home. That had made Rei laugh so hard she ended up wheezing.
They had gone to the doctor because she had been having bad cases of migraines. It turned out she was pregnant once again. The two had explained Rei had fertility troubles, and that they had tried very hard for their daughter. Which was a bold-faced lie, but the doctor needed something to work on.
The couple was explained that sometimes fertility could not only be worked on from the medical side, with medicine and all. The environment also influenced fertility. The doctor theorized that maybe she had been free of stress and at peak health the moment the baby was conceived.
Of course, the health of the partner also had something to do, hence why Judd made that comment.
Putting aside how their new baby was conceived, their faces looked almost about to rip from the huge smiles they sported from joy. They celebrated the miracle in a way that pleased both of them. Buying a piano and a cello.
The past year, when their daughter had learned to go to sleep early and no longer woke them up in the middle of the night, they had spent that well-earned time composing anonymously for many musicians. They collected a pretty sum of money with which they bought their instruments.
A black piano and a white cello.
The new acquisitions looked pompous in their humble house, and almost covered the whole living room. They never cared for interior design. They got the instruments because they needed them. They needed to make music, to connect with it and connect their souls through it. Just like how they did that time at the University.
They could never forget that moment that practically got them together. That opened their eyes to a new life.
Sex was amazing, yes, they reveled in it when they needed the contact of their skins to make sure it was all real, to root them to that moment and forget about their worries for as long as the encounter lasted.
It was with music, though, that they could hold even more intimate moments.
Every day, for some hours, music flooded the little house, either from a piano or a cello, or both, but music anyway. It was a fortune their house was a big distance apart from their closest neighbor as the sound would probably surprise their neighbors and gather unwanted attention.
They didn't want others to break into their musical bubble. They loved it when it was just them three of them – four if they counted the unborn child – that basked in the music they considered 'not apt for outsiders'.
With the additional income from the compositions, their life turned for the better. Since they didn't have to depend on their crops to make money, they often shared what they reaped with their neighbors or exchanged it for other stuff with them. That patch of land gave them an abundance of crops every time the harvest time arrived that they saved lots of money from buying groceries.
They had finally become self-sustainable.
Nobody around them knew they had enough money to buy a bigger and better house than the one they were living in. And it's not as if they wanted to. They loved the peace the small village provided to them. Even if the cries of their daughter didn't make it that peaceful.
Since they played everyday when they had some free time, it didn't come as a surprise when their little girl started taking interest in the piano. Because of that, Judd played it more often, just to see his daughter laugh and clap to the rhythm of the notes.
Rei's belly had quickly grown so big she couldn't play the cello for long periods of time. More so because the same belly didn't allow her to hold the cello how she liked. She was also forbidden to move that much by Judd. She always deemed her husband as dramatic, but she had no reason to go against him for a good reason.
From the last week of her seventh month, her feet started swelling horribly that she sometimes couldn't even move. She spent almost a month like that. A month she enjoyed being taking care of by her husband and their child. Darlene had been tasked to keep her company and entertain her while Judd did everything in the house.
Cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, weeding the land, watering the crops, bathing their daughter and putting her to sleep. Those weeks he became a full-time househusband, as Rei loved to call him. He even massaged her legs and feet at night, peppering them with little kisses that made her giggle.
Those were weeks the two remembered with fondness. She always chuckled and smiled whenever the memory of those weeks came to her mind. A pleasant warm feeling would pool in her chest and spread all over her body.
The birth of their second child was not as daunting as their daughter's.
It came when they were in the city buying new music sheets, strings for the cello and the piano, and some groceries. When she started feel the tell-tale pain in her cervix, they went to the first hospital they found and received a decent attention. This time, Judd had his daughter to accompany him in the long hours that took for his second child to be born.
Neither cared for the gender of both their kids before they were born. What only mattered to them was that they were born healthy.
They were happy when their daughter was born with no complication. The birth of their son was not any different.
Curiously, their son looked a bit like Rei, before her surgery, with a doll-like face. Not her carbon copy, but still soft enough to be confused as a girl. At least their neighbors congratulated them for another girl before being told it was a boy.
That little house couldn't have been noisier with a new crying baby and a girl that wanted to say all the words in the world as if she could never grow tired of her own voice.