---- Chapter 51

Lois walked into the apartment, cracking her neck and stripping off her jacket as she did so. She tossed it over the back of a chair, dropped her purse in the chair and shook some snow out of her hair while rubbing at her nose to warm it up a bit. It would have been nice had this whole healing thing she got from AJ extended to protection from the elements.

Stepping out of her shoes, she walked over to the phone and dialed the number for the farm, waiting a second before getting an answer.

"Hello?"

"Hey Martha, it's Lois."

"Hello, dear. How are you and Almond Joy doing?"

Lois smiled. She didn't think she'd ever tire of hearing Martha's kind words, always making sure that she was alright. "I'm doing fine, as is AJ. I just wanted to call and tell you that Clark is going to be a little while before picking Jordan up. There's a big pileup and on the highway, requiring Superman's help. Even with him involved, it doesn't appear to be quick in clearing up."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Was anybody hurt?"

"Yeah, a few people needed to taken to the hospital Superman style. I was down there a few minutes ago, actually, and am going to write the story up and email it to Perry for the morning edition."

"Well then, I'll let you go. Do you think Clark will be here soon, or should I go ahead and make some dinner for Jordan?"

"I don't know how long it will be, so go ahead and feed her if you'd like to. What you make is going to be better in taste and nutritional value than anything we usually do anyway, and you'll never have me depriving my daughter of Martha Kent's cooking."

"Thank you for the compliment, Lois. I'll talk to you soon. Love you."

"Bye, Martha."

Lois turned the phone off and put it down. She walked into the bedroom and found the laptop, unplugged it, and brought it out to the living room. She turned it on and waited for it to get going, but she really felt like procrastinating the article a bit. It seemed a little jaded, but big car pileups were something she had written before and not something that took a lot of time if one had the facts.

Knowing it had to be done, though, Lois pulled out her notepad and got to writing the story. Twenty minutes later, she had it written. Not wanting to bother with spell check, she went ahead and emailed it to Perry. He was an editor, so it would give him something to edit.

Standing up again, she walked back into the bedroom and unbuttoned her pants, letting them drop off. She stepped out of them and unbuttoned her shirt, pulling it off and tossing it on the bed. Looking in the mirror, she placed a hand on her stomach. She looked months ahead of where she actually was in her pregnancy. She didn't know what one should look like at four and a half months, but she didn't think it would be as big as she was. When she stood next to Chloe, nobody thought they had conceived within a week of each other unless she were to tell them she was having twins, which was annoying.

It was still hard to believe that she was pregnant. She'd made herself accept things so quickly that while she'd had a lot of disbelief, she had needed to dispel it all. Things still caught up to her here and there, though. It was such a mind blowing thing that she didn't know if she'd be used to it by the time she was giving birth.

She inspected her entire body, tracing her finger along her stomach before it trailed off onto her thighs. She had to back up a bit to see them in the mirror, but she could tell they were getting bigger. They didn't look all the big, yet, but they felt heftier than they had been. That led her up to her breasts, which definitely felt and looked heftier. She held each up in a hand and noted that they were still very sensitive. Her thoughts drifted to Clark and what they had done last night. Yeah, very sensitive.

Grinning, she pulled out some sweat pants and put them on, then walked into the closet, finding her plaid sleeping shirt hanging up and buttoned it on. Honestly, she loved the feel of the shirt. She hadn't taken to sleeping in it as much since she'd forgotten, but she thought she might soon. It was all sorts of soft and really deserving to be slept in. It was also warm, which was obviously good this time of year, even if Clark was her own personal furnace.

Lois walked back to the dresser and kicked it a couple times, watching as the secret drawer popped open. She pulled out the diary and closed the drawer before walking out to the living room and sitting down on the couch. Clark had told her earlier that after she forgot, there weren't really any stories until Jordan's birth, and they had already done that one. She got the cliff notes version anyway, making sure she remembered the important stuff before he'd had to head out to help people.

Bathtub, grunting, baby, happiness, bed, placenta and night at the hospital. Seemed simple enough.

Basically, she figured, the diary and the flashbacks were meshed up in the time frame now. It was about time. She didn't know if she blamed Clark for only telling her stories when she asked, which she knew was all sorts of irrational, or blamed herself for getting ahead in the diary. Maybe she could blame herself for not finding the diary sooner after forgetting in 2018. Shaking her head at how ridiculous that seemed, she decided to just go ahead and read. She flipped to the next entry, taking a deep breath before starting to read.

September 28, 2018

I love this little girl laying next to me. I love her so much it's scary, but I can't stop. Every time she looks at me with those eyes, my eyes, I melt a little and just want to hold her close.

It's not like they say it is. The love is just... the best kind of overwhelming I've ever felt. I want to be around her all the time. I want to watch her move her arms and legs around. Watching her sleep has become one of my favorite things to do at all hours of the day. She's my baby girl. I don't know what else to say.

She was born on August 18th in circumstances I could not have imagined. I looked at the last entry, and I see that I wrote about the backaches I was having all the time. Well, those turned out to be a lot more than that after that entry.

I'd been having especially intense backaches for most of the day and didn't really feel like having sex, so I decided to take a hot bath to relax the muscles (I hadn't mentioned those last time, but I'd really been alternating between the massages and hot baths for a couple weeks). There had been the occasional muscle tightness across my stomach during the day, but after thinking about what happened a hundred times, I still maintain that they were Braxton-Hicks. There was no consistency to the contractions.

Anyway, like I said, taking a bath. I'd filled it as much as I could to where it wouldn't run over the top when I was in it, so that when I slouched I was almost totally immersed. Yay for having a larger than normal tub.

I was laying there with my eyes closed, imagining holding Jordan when she was older (I'd been kind of dreamy once we finally chose a name). I saw my baby girl giggling in my arms as we messed around on the floor in front of a coloring book. I know it seems silly, but it was so vivid... the best way to describe it is a vision. Yes, it just sounds like a daydream, but...

I know that it sounds strange, but with everything we've experienced over the years, I wouldn't doubt that what I saw happens someday.

But not the point. Getting off track here. Thinking of Jordan tends to do that to me.

I was laying in the tub, with one leg splayed up over the side of even with the tub as full as it was. For some reason, it felt good. Don't ask me why, it just did. My back tensed up and I had been in a little while so the water was shilling a bit, so I leaned forward to drain out some of the chill and put a little more hot water in the tub. That's when it happened.

The baby just... dropped. It went from feeling like I had a tiny person pressing down in my lower stomach to feeling like I had a tiny person in my vagina and running towards the light, so to speak. I had about nine seconds between her dropping into the birth canal and the urge to push where I just had a 'What the hell is going on?!' moment. Then the urge to push hit.

I'd wondered what the urge to push would feel like. I'd asked Chloe, and all she had said was that she'd never really had the overwhelming urge to push some women describe. She'd just gotten to ten centimeters and they'd told her to start pushing, so she did, and then she had a baby or two.

To be frank, it felt like I had to go to the bathroom. Not 'Huh, I have to go to the bathroom but I can hold it,' but a 'HOLY CRAP IT'S HAPPENING NOW!' emergency where had I pants, there would have been stains. Except in this case, there would have been a baby in my pants, which probably would have been even more awkward.

(On a related note, Chloe actually said that accidental pooping during birth is fairly common, so I thought it was something I had coming. Yay for not enjoying that perk.)

I tried the breathing through the first urge. I 'he he he'd' like a woman breathing giggles one syllable at a time, but it didn't do anything. I wasn't in control of my body. Despite that fact that I was actively not helping my muscles do anything, they were doing it on their own and I felt Jordan moving right along, in a do not stop until you pass go/labia manner.

So, in between urges, I yelled for Clark and waited a second, then it hit again and I started pushing.

It didn't hurt, per se, at least not yet. I don't think I had time to really notice pain, because it was happening so quickly. I went from laying in a tub to relieve a backache to actively giving birth in about a minute, so the mind was less that aware of a few things.

I pushed with it, grunting a little as I did so because it's a grunting kind of thing. There's a lot of effort in helping a body pass out of your body, though admittedly I only had a short burst of effort where most women have hours and hours of exhaustion and effort.

That was when Clark got there. I let up with the grunting as the urge let up too, and Clark asked me if he could get me to a hospital. I was too distracted to be sarcastic (looking back, it was a prime opportunity for snark), and just told him that the baby was coming now through deep breaths.

Another contraction started, and I may have said something like 'it's coming again' because Clark told me to trust my body and push when I felt the urge. That was NOT a problem, because there wasn't much I could do to stop from pushing had I wanted to, as established earlier in this entry. This one hurt, and then top to it off Jordan crowned.

Ow.

Clark did something in super speed that caused a little gust of wind, and then told me to breathe through the crowning so that I didn't tear. I wonder now, if my perineum had torn, if it would have healed, since Jordan would no longer be in me. I'm glad I didn't have to deal with it, though.

What I really wonder, though, is how Clark could have been calm through me giving birth in our bath tub. The man just does not get flapped! Here I was, giving birth to our daughter with no buildup to the event like most women have, and the man comes in, asks if he can get me to the hospital and tells me to breathe through her crowning so that I don't tear like it's just another day. Unbelievable.

So, I breathed. Well, for a moment. Her head birthed a little more and I, involuntarily mind you, started pushing again with a moan. I don't know why I moaned; it wasn't really a moan moment so much as a screaming one. I usually don't moan unless Clark and I are in the middle of something that leads to children being born. I don't really think childbirth was orgasmic for me, though some women find it to be. More power to 'em, I guess.

I moaned, I pushed and her head was birthed. She actually rotated for a second, which I read was so that the shoulders aligned to birth easier. Whatever it was, I needed to push again, and the shoulders hurt like hell. Pretty sure I screamed during that.

The shoulders were out and then she just slipped out into Clark's hands. After a second he pulled her up out of the water, and I guess I had splashed some while pushing or something because the water was low enough so that he could place her on my chest, which is what he did.

He swished out her mouth with his pinky (don't ask me where he figured out to do that) and said something about her being here. I would have taken more notice, but I was enamored. The second I saw her I was so in love it would be scary if it wasn't so great. My baby girl was born successfully, something I had been kind of worried about because she was not small by a longshot.

9lbs, 8oz. I pushed nine and a half pounds of baby out of me. Un-freaking-believable, isn't it?

She then let out a wail and I had a Grinch moment where my heart grew like, three sizes. The love I had felt a second ago was nothing compared to what I felt when I heard her. It's undescribable, really. The Grinch thing is not even really an apt metaphor because it wasn't like my heart had been too small before, but it gets the point across.

I reached down and ran a hand over her, unable to stop from smiling or crying out of pure, unadulterated happiness. After a moment I wanted to hold her, so I carefully pulled her up into my arms. It was... ya know, for a journalist I sure find myself having indescribable feelings a lot. I like being able to describe things, but I guess it just won't happen at all times for me.

Anyway, I held her. It was amazing. My baby girl was here, and this may set women back or sound like I was some loopy nut with a crappy life. Maybe it doesn't and it's completely natural, who cares. I felt whole. I felt like a piece I'd never known was missing was suddenly in place.

Clark pulled the plug and let all the water drain. Soon after, he was lifting Jordan and I up and carried us to the bed, setting us down gently. I barely noticed as I was holding Jordan close and just looking at her. I didn't want to stop looking at her, ever.

Clark came over and sat next to me on the bed, leaning over and kissing Jordan lightly as he covered the both of us with a blanket. He asked me how I was, and I told him I was great, because I was. I had my baby girl in my arms.

Do you see a theme here?

We all just sat there for a few minutes before I thought about if she was hungry or not when I noticed her doing a weird thing with her mouth that looked like sucking. I got her all situated, which took a little while since she couldn't seem to latch on right, but we got going, and that brought about the pleasantness of more contractions. They weren't really all that bad, just hard enough to deliver the placenta in a timely manner.

Clark called the paramedics and my doctor a few minutes after the contractions started again, figuring I should get checked out on all that. I delivered the placenta, Clark doing the catching honors again with a bowl, and then the paramedics got there. Jordan nursed through it all.

They inspected the placenta and said it was all out, thankfully. A quick ride to Metropolis General and an Apgar test later (her first of many perfect scores I foresee for her, thank you very much), I was set up in a bed and Jordan was wearing a nifty pink hat along with being swaddled. They taught me how to do that, too.

We had to spend the night there, and aside from making a couple saves, Clark was there with us the entire time, holding Jordan almost as much as I did. He took to it naturally, of course. He was telling her that he was always going to protect her, all the things that you expect a father to be telling his little girl.

While I was in the hospital, I was told about a new procedure to remove scarring. They said I could have it done once I was feeling up to it. I thought about the scars, about whether or not I wanted to have to explain to my daughter about how her mother was attacked and as a result, her face looked different. I knew that I would have to explain things anyway when I forgot, but I thought about her being a kid, and people telling her that her mommy looked funny...

I barely thought about the scars anymore. When I'd first forgotten, I would look in the mirror and the first thing I thought about was how different I looked with scars where once had been smooth skin. Then as time passed, I stopped noticing them. They just became a part of my face, no different than my eyes or nose. They just... were.

But did I want my daughter growing up thinking her mom was disfigured? I remember what it was like as a kid. Children are brutal. They'll latch on anything and tease people about it. I know it's strange, thinking about what your child's friends or non-friends may latch on to in the future, but it's the kind of thing that gets in my head these days. I'm always thinking about Jordan and what's best for her, even when she's ten years old.

It's why I had the scars removed. You know this, of course, since your face is unscarred. The rest of your body is, too, because the jackass that did it removed all my scars and not just the ones on my face and others I'd indicated from the attack. I don't even know how it happened, because I thought I was awake for the whole thing.

I must have let my mind drift to Jordan and just completely zoned out, because after an hour the guy said we were done, and all my scars were gone. I had nothing but smooth skin all over my body. While this is the dream of some women, I am not some women. Scars were a reminder of where I had been and what I had accomplished.

Ah well.

The important thing is, my daughter is here. She made quite an entrance, too. I think it's a sign of things to come. I don't think a child of Clark Kent could be anything less than a world changer, and our daughter may have inherited my tendency to do things with a bit of flair. I think it'll suit her, though I may be biased. I am her mother.

Lois closed the diary and started biting her lip. The quick description of the birth that Clark had given her earlier seemed a lot less necessary than it had seemed then. It also seemed much less detailed, because apparently she'd wanted herself to know exactly what had happened when she wrote about it in the diary. She appreciated the details, but the mental pictures she'd drawn while reading that had been... vivid.

Giving herself a shake, Lois put the diary down and got up off the couch, walking into the kitchen and grabbing the bowl of grapes in the fridge. She started plucking them off and popping them in her mouth as she walked back to the couch, sitting down next to the diary again. Grabbing the remote, she flipped on the television.

All the local channels were still running news, with live footage of Superman still working on the pileup. Sighing, Lois ate a few more grapes. She was glad that she'd told Martha to go ahead and make dinner for Jordan beyond just the nutritional value, because it didn't look like Clark was going to be home any time in the near future.

Placing the grapes on her side, she grabbed the diary again and flipped back to where she'd been and read through the details of Jordan's birth again. It was no less vivid the second time around. She really wanted to remember it, because it seemed that as soon as Jordan was born, it was just love. Overwhelming love that she felt for her daughter, much as she had the first night when she really realized that Jordan was her daughter.

Lois hoped it would be like that again with AJ. All of it, really. As crazy as it seemed to have been, Jordan's birth didn't seem like it lent itself to be the harrowing and long ordeal that childbirth seemed to be for most women. It was more of a wham, bam, thank you ma'am deal. She liked the prospect of that more than she did the prospect of hours and hours of pain.

Shaking her head, she knew that it was months away before she got to a point where that could happen. She hoped she was months away from something like that happening. No need for premature labor.

Lois stretched out a second, then laid a hand on her stomach when AJ kicked. She smiled and looked down at her stomach. "Well, hello to you too. I know it's a little early, but I'm putting in a request for a quick labor and delivery. If you want to be like your sister and make a quick entrance in the middle of a bath, be my guest. Heck, I'm already fairly certain you're going to be like your father, so some of that speed you'll probably inherit could be used in this. Please?"

When AJ kicked again, Lois took that as a yes.

Grinning at her own silliness, which she found went right along with her happiness, she flipped the pages in the diary until she got to the next entry.

October 15th, 2018

I reread the last entry in this, and I find that I left something out. I guess I was still under the 'New Mommy Haze' that Chloe has taken to calling it. She says she's seen it in numerous women with their first child (herself included), where they get wrapped up and the crazy of what's actually going on doesn't seem to penetrate for a little while. That 'haze' is no longer prevalent for me, and I have to say this:

Babies are a ton of work.

Don't get me wrong, I love my baby girl like nothing else in the world. Jordan will be first in my life, always. She gets my love until the day I die whether she wants it or not, and knowing me, there will be times we really butt heads over things. (You know as well as I that if mom had lived, we'd have had some knock down, drag out verbal wars with because of my tendencies towards the mischievous and the stubborn) But, first and foremost, I will always do what I think is best for her.

That said... I'm a little fried. Jordan has already proven just how much like her mother she is, because she does not appear to have inherited one single bit of the calm that Clark has. No, she is an all hours of the day kinda gal. Of course, this may be a baby thing, but I don't think I am that lucky. She also has the lungs of an elephant, unless I'm mistaken, and is not afraid to use them when she is perturbed.

And she is perturbed a lot. Well, that may not be entirely true. I think she likes attention, and when nobody is giving it to her, she does her best to get some. Whether it's displeasure or early signs that she likes to be the center of attention, who knows. If she ever has any brothers or sisters, that may be a problem. I assume that she'll calm with time, though. Here's hoping.

So far, I find that she is more of a napper than a full on sleeper. She'll sleep off and on during the day and night, but she doesn't really ever go down for long periods of time, though I am thinking of acquiring a new definition for long periods of time, because I am up for long periods of time these days.

One thing I can say, though, is that she likes the Daily Planet. I started taking her in with me a couple times a week a couple weeks ago, and Jordan was just looking around like she was taking it all in. She was a lot more calm in the hustle and bustle of the newsroom than she was at home for a few days.

I don't know what it was, but Clark' s theory is that she liked all the people. She was the same way at the hospital and the few days after she came home when she had people fussing over her all the time.

Yeah, center of attention.

Ten minutes after her first time in, she had Perry wrapped around her little finger and proclaiming that she would be the next generation of great journalists. Apparently, with her parents, she could be nothing else.

One thing I have noted she inherited from both her parents is a healthy appetite. I don't know how this didn't get mentioned last time (probably the 'New Mommy Haze'), but she eats like crazy. My nipples were all kind of sore until just recently because she was eating every couple hours and it took some time for them to either toughen up or become a little desensitized. And for the first couple weeks, I got some surprisingly strong contractions while breastfeeding. I don't feel 'em anymore, but that was something I wished I'd remembered Chloe warning me about.

Feeding, of course, brings me around to the subject of diapers.

Wow. I changed a couple now and then with the twins when I was pregnant, hoping to get the hang of it. It wasn't difficult, just kind of unpleasant, as common sense would tell you. It still hasn't become any more pleasant, and I think Jordan found a way to make it less pleasant. She is an impressive pooper.

I don't think that's a sentence I could have ever imagined thinking, let alone writing, until I became a parent.

The truth is, parenthood has changed how I see the world. It's not just about me anymore. It's not just about what I want, what I think I should do to be me. My life has changed to being about Jordan. It's like the mommy switch in my brain got flipped, because everything I think involves Jordan these days.

At work last Friday I was talking to Perry and he asked me how I planned to go about getting a story on a local business doing some damned dirty things. The first thought that popped into my head was about how I could do the investigation without it getting too crazy because Jordan needed me. I actually thought about how me doing my usual thing could leave Jordan without her mother for a while, if not forever should my luck run out.

I don't know what Perry thought, but I froze. It hadn't come to me until that point that the risks I always took in getting the story could have a negative effect on Jordan. It had always seemed like things would go back to being business as usual, but they couldn't.

I knew right then that I was going to have to refine my ways of getting stories so that my life was not at risk as much. It was probably something that was a long time coming, really, but I guess it took having a daughter to really figure it out.

What I haven't figured out is how I'm going to adapt to not taking as many risks. I doubt that it will be as quick a change as I made to being a mother, but then I don't have to push this out of my vagina and fall in love with it immediately. That seems unnecessarily graphic, but as you can tell by my wording, I like my style of story getting and am not looking forward to stopping myself from taking the usual steps.

I told Clark that I was going to have to change my ways, and he said something about having to see it to believe it. He did admit that if it was true, he figured he wouldn't lose nearly as many years off his life as he usually did every month or two. I maintain that I did nothing bad enough that caused him to lose years off his life. I think he just takes hostage situations way too seriously.

Martha, of course, has been great help with Jordan. She spent a week here in Metropolis when Jordan was born, and tries to get out here every couple weekends if we can't get to the farm. I felt kind of overwhelmed at first, right after Jordan was born, but Martha helped me through it, as did Chloe. It was a lot, knowing that there was a little life dependent on me for so much. It took me a few days to realize that I could handle it.

Speaking of Chloe, she's enjoying her life these days. The twins are good, quickly heading towards turning one. You can already see their personalities emerging, and it's as Chloe thought it would be: Aly is more like her and Liz is more like Bruce. Jack is also good, and it never fails to amaze me just how much of a little Chloe he is.

I'm tempted to run a DNA test on him and see if he isn't just Chloe with a different sex chromosome. I really can't tell that Bruce donated any genetic material. I would not be surprised to find evidence that one of Chloe's eggs had just gone wild to become Jack.

In the world of actual news... it's been a little quiet, actually. Lex hasn't been up to anything outwardly nefarious, though that doesn't mean he isn't planning nefariousness. The article I mentioned previously is something that Clark and I stumbled into, actually.

What appears to be happening is that a local business, which has been rising through the ranks and expanding to a bigger store on almost a yearly basis, is using child labor. How, you ask? Well, from what I've seen so far, it's clever and well hidden. His employee base has something in common: they've all adopted children, but nobody sees them at their homes. That's all I'm sure of for now, but put together those facts together with being told he uses child labor...

Let's just say I look forward to bringing this jackass to justice if it's true.

I don't really have much more to say. Jordan is currently nursing like she hasn't eaten in days, but I have her situated so that I can write while doing so. Breastfeeding is still one of things that strikes me as something that I can't believe I'm taking part in. I talked about it earlier and how my nipples have had to toughen up, but the fact that my daughter is actually sucking on my boob for food... it just kind of boggles the mind. My mind is actually boggled.

After a moments thought, I don't know that I've described it well with ming boggling. I would shrug, or do some other gesture to explain how strange I find it, because I don't know that words cover it, but I don't think gesturing translates into words any better than my feelings do. Once again, I am a journalist unable to describe something. All I can say is that it's a good thing I never have to describe my feelings in articles.

Clark is currently doing something with the Justice League, but I didn't ask what. There hasn't been any news on big things happening anywhere in the world, so I assume that it's just a meeting or something along those lines. If they are actually doing something in a world saving manner, they're hiding it pretty damn well. They are the Justice League, though, so being good at hiding major world badness wouldn't be shocking.

Well, apparently I did have more to say. But on that note, I now have nothing more to say and a crying, smelly daughter to tend to. I love her, but I look forward to her being able to talk and go to the bathroom in the actual bathroom. Truthfully, though, I'd never trade these days for anything. She's my daughter, and I'm happy to take care of her. More than happy.

It's a privilege. One I do not take lightly, and one I do not think you take lightly either, no matter when you are. She's our heart.

Lois closed the diary, smiling a little bit. She knew what her other self meant when she said that Jordan was her heart. She felt the exact same way. If anything ever happened to her... no, better to not go down that road. It would only lead to bad thoughts and crazy levels of protectiveness that would smother her daughter.

What was nice was to see a more realistic view of being a mother to a baby. She hadn't really expected things to be easy, and she was fairly certain all babies were different, but at least she had something to use as a reference for what was normal. Kind of. It had spared the graphic details she could really use, unlike the previous entry, but at least she knew that Jordan ate every couple hours at one point.

Sore nipples. That had not been something she'd ever thought of. It made sense, really, if you didn't have somebody sucking on your boob all day that when it started, it would require some toughening up. It didn't sound all that enjoyable, though, and Lois found the idea of her son sucking on her for food just as mind boggling as she'd apparently found it to be when Jordan was a baby.

Popping another grape in her mouth, Lois looked down at her stomach like she had earlier that evening. "You, AJ, are going to cause a whole lot of fuss, aren't you? You're going to put mommy through the ringer with all this pregnancy stuff, probably, and cap that off with being born. You're my little boy, and I will always love you no matter what you do, but labor might be the toughest part of our relationship. One can only hope.

"And then you're going to be a baby. You're going to need all of my attention at all hours of the day for nursing, for diaper changes and just general attention. I'm assuming that both of us will probably have some sleepless nights. Hopefully, though, you'll inherit more of your dad's mannerisms than your sister has. She is... she is me while looking like your dad. It's kind of weird, actually.

"But know this, and I know I say it to you a lot, but I don't feel I can say it enough: I love you. I love you like I love one other small person on this entire planet. I will always be there for you if it is humanly possible. You, along with your sister, will be the number one priority in my life. The same goes for your dad. He will always hold you and your sister first, because he loves you as much as I do. He doesn't get the up close and personal part of the relationship quite as much as I do, but he loves you just as much."

"Yes, he does."

"And so do I!"

Lois jumped, her eyes going wide for a second. She placed a hand over her heart as she turned to find her husband and daughter standing in the doorway. She was really going to need to not lose her sense of hearing while she talked to AJ in the future.

"You guys scared the bejesus out of me! Am I going to have to put bells on your necks so I know when you're coming?"

Clark grinned as he took Jordan's coat and let his own slide off. "I don't think that would work for me. People might wonder if Superman had lost his mind, wearing a bell around his neck as he helped people."

"Yeah, well, people are just going to have to deal." She was tempted to stick out her tongue at him, but figured that wouldn't set the best example, Instead, she spoke to Jordan. "How was your day, baby girl? Did grandma make good food for dinner?"

Jordan nodded. "Yeah! She made soup and we had smelly bread to eat with it, then ate a small piece of cake for dessert."

Lois looked up at Clark. "Smelly bread?"

"Garlic bread."

She nodded before looking at Jordan again. "Well, I'm glad you had a good dinner with your grandma." Lois popped one last grape in her mouth before standing up and taking the bowl back to the fridge. The things were starting to get too warm, and that was without the fact that she would eat them all after much longer. She turned and looked at Clark again. "So, do we just want to scrounge for dinner?"

"I'm sure I could find something to throw together if you wanted something more than a few sandwiches or the like."

"Nah, that's alright. Seems like a good night for keeping things informal." Lois looked to Jordan again, and scowled playfully. "Here's a question: why haven't I gotten a hug yet? I like to get one whenever you get home at night!"

Jordan ran over and jumped into Lois's arms, and she pulled the little girl up into the hug.

"I love Almond Joy too, mommy."

Lois looked at Jordan. "What?"

"Daddy and I heard you talking. You said you love Almond Joy, and I love him too."

Lois smiled and placed a soft kiss on Jordan's head before letting it go back to resting on her shoulder. She couldn't believe how much those few words from Jordan had made her so happy. Jesus, she felt tears starting to form. Damn hormones. It was just about the best thing she'd ever heard, though.

"I know you do, Jordan. And AJ loves you too, though it may be a while before he is able to say it. And if he is more like your father than he is like me, then it may be a little longer than that, but he loves you as much as you love him."

"I think I was just insulted. Kind of. Maybe."

She glanced over to Clark, about to explain, but the grin he wore belied his statement as good natured. She went ahead with her explanation anyway. "You know that I am much more prone to the gift of gab, Smallville. As such, I say how soon and how often our son talks will probably be a good indicator of whom he takes after more."

"I can't argue that, at least not with Jordan as an example. She spoke early and she spoke often. You had her singing Frère Jacques at a very early age."

Lois racked her brain, trying to remember the song. When it finally popped into her head, she frowned; she'd heard it a few times over the years but it had never really meant anything to her. "Why that song?"

He shrugged. "You never gave a reason why, just started using it once and didn't stop until you forgot."

Lois looked back down at Jordan. "You liked Frère Jacques, eh?" She nodded, grinning from ear to ear. "Want to sing it?" Again there was nodding, and the two of them broke out into song as Lois walked over to the couch and sat them down. With Jordan singing along, it was a much better song than she remembered.