Chapter 9

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As we did our best to calm all of the babies down, we encountered a few teensy weensy problems..

One, the babies needed a separate space, and two, someone had to be with them most of the time.

Three, what were they gonna eat?

Let's just leave that to later, right now I need to think of how I'm gonna take care of approximately twenty-four babies on my own.

I don't even know if they had names before the incident. What am I supposed to call them?

Ugh, this is so frustrating.

I opened my tired eyes and looked around me. Some of the babies were sleeping beside me on the couch while the rest of them were scattered across the floor which was all covered in blankets.

I looked around to see that besides me, only Marcus was there, sleeping with the babies on the floor.

Melanie walked in from the kitchen a second later with a few bottles of milk.

"Oh, you're awake. Good morning." She whispered to me as she sat down and picked up one of the babies.

"Good morning." I mumbled as I carefully stood up and haphazardly walled over to her through the hoard of babies.

I sat next to her as she fed one of the babies that had just woken up.

*sigh* "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to add another burden onto us, I just-" I started jabbering again then stopped stunned as Melanie put a finger over my lips.

"It's ok, it's not your fault you have a fuller heart than the rest of us. If it was me, I probably wouldn't have even thought of it because of how I can get. If Anyone else was in our situation they would've run far off by now. It's none of our faults. Ok?" she stated with a warm smile.

"Ok." I mumbled as I took a bottle from her and picked up a baby that had seemingly just woken up.

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It had been eight hours since the whole kafuffle, and they were all trying their best to keep every baby happy and quiet as I jotted down things in my notepad.

Essential items.

(1) Place to stay,

(2) Lots of milk/baby food,

And,

(3) A permanent caretaker.

Since the Willow house was the biggest throughout our street, we might have to make a room or two for the babies over there.

We could head out now if someone would let me, and get more supplies from the stores, plus now everything is like free.

Since I have brought this upon myself, I will be their permanent caretaker. That too for the time being.

And now what do we do about their names? Scrap names, I don't even know how many are boys and how many are girls! How do we even check that..?

I showed the notepad to Melanie who was holding two babies at the same time and then showed them to Marcus as well since it was gonna be his house that we'll be using.

So now to get them all to the Willow house.. Let's leave that for later and first set everything up.

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I was about to step out of the door when Marcus grabbed me from behind.

"Where do you think you're going?" he questioned with a piercing look.

"To help." I said looking up at him innocently.

*sigh* "Go ahead then, but cover up tightly. Don't catch a cold." He said and stepped outside.

I walked back up to the room and put on an extra hoodie.

Running back downstairs, I walked out toward my house. Opening the door, I walked into nothing but silence. My heart ached as I remembered all the memories I had in this house, something that I can never go back to.

Putting aside my heart-wrenching thoughts and feelings, I walked into the basement and turned on the light.

Looking around for a bit, I sighed when I found that my old crib was still there. I pulled it out from under some boxes and was startled when one of them fell with a loud thump.

I slightly opened the box to see that it was filled with picture books and other collages. Loading them into the crib, I dragged them out and upstairs.

As I dragged it across the sidewalk I saw that the others had brought over most of the cribs from the other side of the neighborhood.

As I passed by Melanie's house, I took hold of the things I had loaded onto my crib and took it inside.

By the time I had run back out, someone had already taken over there so I just took a nice long walk there.

As I reached there, Marcus gestured for me to follow him up to check out which room to use.

I picked one of the bigger rooms so that they were hopefully all in the same place.

I stood in the room and stationed each crib as Marcus, Felix, and William helped bring them upstairs.

It took some time but we eventually settled everything down. We then proceeded to bring them over and were able to figure out what gender each of them was.

"Now, the names.." I mumbled as I looked at each of them with uncertainty.

"Did they have name tags on their cribs back in the hospital?" Melanie asked as I paced about the room lost in thought.

"Yeah, but we don't remember what name went to which baby and they all look very similar, so even if we tried, we won't be able to figure out which name goes to which baby." I heard Felix answer as he sat down in one of the chairs that had been placed there.

"Which hospital did you get them from?" I asked looking over at them.

"I think it was the starlight hospital, why?" Felix said looking over at me with a raised brow.

"Hmm, no reason," I mumbled as I touched one of the girl's towels.

It was very soft, and as I rolled a small part of it off of her tiny body, there was a name visible written in cursive.

"Holly Maybell." I said out loud.

"What?" Melanie asked.

"There are names written on their towels." I said with a small chuckle.

'Their names sound pretty too.'