Chapter 118

Dear Brianna,

Hi, it's your friend Lily. At least I hope I can call you my friend. Although with all that I dumped on you about my life in my last letter I'm concerned that you might not want to receive another letter from me.

With that in mind I want to say that I will do my best not to revisit the dark side of my life with you. Instead I'll try to focus more on the wonderful things that have happened to me since I joined the family of Master Will, and Mistress Marissa. One of those is the person of Veronica, my daughter. She signed my name today. I don't know why, but that made me cry. Maybe I expected her to call me mama?

Actually I do know, at least in part why I cried. Master Will wasn't here to see Veronica born, or to see her making her first foray into communicating with the people around her. Ron held me for a while, and told me that he thought that Master Will would be very amazed to see how well all the children are doing at expressing themselves.

Sign language has been a boon. I knew it before. But seeing it with the baby I birthed is even more convincing. Veronica yells to get our attention. But when she sees our face she signs to tell us what is wrong. Sometimes what she says is just 'I hurt'. But that is better than just yelling. We change diapers and tell the children they are dirty and getting clean in words and sign. Pretty soon if they have a dirty diaper they yell and sign that they're dirty.

Of course sign language can't tell us everything, 'cause they don't have enough experience to tell us all of their problems. The other day for example Veronica was complaining that her tummy hurt. I tried nursing her. But that didn't help. Apparently she had the sort of cramps that we call colic. So the only thing any of us could do was rub her tummy until we could get her into the med-center to be checked out.

Yeah I know we probably could have popped her into the pod sleep-trainer, but I wasn't hearing that! No! No, I wanted her to go through a med-tube. I suppose that every new mother with a new baby, especially one who came hard and early like Veronica did would feel the same way.

We got a bit of information from Master Will the other day. He and the Captain of the Aer Lingus believe that they can at least make their way back to Earth. And if they can do that, then they will make it home to Atlantis-At. However, unless they can take whatever shortcut they took to end up where they are on their return trip the AI estimates something on the order of two years in transit!