-Abraham came to visit and bring us home Thursday afternoon. While we waited for my lunch to arrive, he climbed into the hospital bed with me and Liam. The three of us cuddled while huge snowflakes swirled around outside our window.
-When we arrived at Grandma's to pick up Soren, I came in first and found him in a high chair eating supper. "Mommy!" he said cheerfully. "Mommy, mommy, mommy!" I gave him kisses. Then Daddy brought in the new baby and we talked about him for a while, explaining again to Soren how this was his baby, his new little brother. Soren seemed intrigued by this idea. And then the baby started to cry. So I picked him up, explaining that I needed to feed the new baby. Soren immediately began to scream, his eyes welled up with tears, he threw his bowl and spoon on the floor, and between sobs he said, "Hug? Hug? Hug?" I, being the mature adult, burst into tears as well.
-Soren's hands seemed so small to me just a few days ago. Now they seem enormous. I sat in a rocking chair with Liam last night and cried and cried, thinking about how hard I've tried to remember everything about Soren's babyhood, and how I don't, and how he's grown so big so fast. I cried, too, because it's hard to split my time between those two little angels of mine.
-Liam is so tiny. He weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces at birth and is 21 inches long. His little legs and little arms are thin enough that Grandma says she thinks he looks like a little refugee baby. They are long and narrow and covered with loose jaundiced skin. His skin is very soft and I love his sweet tiny little smell. I can't get over how narrow and little his rib cage is, how long and thin his fingers are.
-Our first night home we decided Liam was starving to death. He nursed and nursed and nursed and never seemed to get enough. We decided to give him a little formula to tide him over until my milk came in. Digging around in our cupboards, we discovered that while we had bottles, we had no nipples. So after each nursing session we would feed him formula with a dropper. At about four AM, after a three hour nursing session, we had him eating from a dropper again. It struck me that he looked like an orphaned kitten and I cried and cried and cried. (My milk supply has since increased and the little one has been eating and pooping like, well, a newborn.)
-Liam is a good nurser. He latches on without trouble and eats very gently. Soren thinks this nursing thing is very weird. When he and his daddy were looking at a book together. Soren pointed at a picture of a glue bottle on one page and said, "Boobie. Ewww." Forgetting, apparently, about the first 13 months of his own life, when boobies didn't seem so gross.
-Liam currently alternates his nights with me and Abe: the first few hours he sleeps on Daddy while they watch movies. Then he nurses for like three hours. Then he and Abe sleep on the couch or rocker recliner. I get up with Soren at around 7 and we have some baby-free time together. We'll all be sad when Daddy goes back to work.
1 comment:
Rachel~! Oh, if I were you, in that moment on Thursday when Soren cried... mature adult or no, I would have Cried, too!!
If I were Soren and this new baby thing latched onto MY MOMMY, I would have thrust everything from me and screamed and REJECTED this HORRIBLE NEW REALITY and cried forlorn self-pitying tears, TOO! What a horrible existence-altering trick to play on the adored center of everything!!!
If I were the "Daddy" I'd hate to go back to work, and if I were the person supposed to now divide myself in half YET AGAIN I could barely bear to let him!
I can't BEGIN to make room in all this imagining to stretch and feel what it's like for Liam! It's SO much!!
Oh, the interest and tension I feel as I wait to hear what comes next! Your life story is told with the ear of a novelist, it washes over me like a novel, oh how I WISH you "the novelist" could allow me to turn a few pages!
WHAT COMES NEXT???!
I want to jump ahead and find out if the Mommy and Daddy ever get to have normal sleep! I want to know, DOES the new baby turn out to really be a KITTEN?! (Probably not, this is a naturalistic, and not a sci fi, novel.) I also long to discover if Soren recovers from all the shock and horror... Although there is foreshadowing that recovery will eventually occur... after all, Mommy understands that Soren having Mommy, exclusively, FIRST thing in the day is, in the universal scheme of things, only right, just, and fair.
(I have to say, thank goodness I can't recall the "NEW BABY HORROR" happening! It did happen, I'm the oldest by almost 4 years. I only remember thinking my brother was sort of awe-inspiring at first, and as soon as the awe wore off I realized he was way too stupid to be competition! But apparently he thought I was the funniest thing ever.)
Since my only choice is to wait to hear more, I, like Soren, whose only choice is to accept, will do so as grudgingly as possible.
Still, I am so encouraged, and grateful, as your avid reader, that you still have time for me/us in this new era!!
Sorry to take up so much space. HUGS I SEND THEE SO THAT YE MAY HAVE SOME TO SPARE!!!! Heidi
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