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i spent a lot of today staring at the pile of thank you cards i need to write.

i got half of one written. it’s hard to write thank you cards when you’re it seems like you’re holding a nursing baby all the time. and i thought, in passing, how the hell did i get all these written so promptly when Oscar was born?

Oscar was colicky. i was overwhelmed and exhausted, and still reeling, blah blah blah. but i wrote the damn thank yous, put a photo of Oscar in each one, labelled and addressed them and divied them up, some to the mailbox, some for Dave to drop off at the university to the many people there who gave us gifts at his birth. because i try to do that kind of thing, and it’s still relatively de rigeur around here, in this last bastion of the fifties. and because those social niceties matter to me when people have gone to the trouble to do something kind…it is a point of pride for me to make the effort in return. yes, i was raised by Emily Post. but i busted my ass on those thank you cards, that time around. when i had very, very little reserve to draw on for that busting.

imagine, then, my face when i happened upon six or seven of those two-and-a-half-year-old thank you cards tonight, still sealed, never delivered, in the bottom of Dave’s filing cabinet where he sent me to dig for folder tabs.

Dave has a very bad habit of forgetting things.

part of me is mortified. the good people from the university who never got properly thanked for the fine and lovely gifts you gave Oscar? um…uh…yeh. guess it’s a little late.

the bigger part of me is furious. foot-stomping, arm-flapping, indignantly righteously ragingly furiously mad, teeth pulled back from my lips like a hyena. comical, i suppose, given that the statute of limitations on thank you cards is likely past. but i’m all…besmirched. i never went out of my way to thank most of these people in person, because i thought they’d received a pleasant card, replete with photo memento, so for two+ years i’ve been blithely interacting with these colleagues without so much as a “hey, that was nice”. that’s rude. and i hate being rude. and i’d spent hours of my sleep-deprived time and energy to prepare those cards and photo mementoes, and all Dave had to do was take them to work and toss them in the internal mailbox. that’s it. and he TOLD me he’d done it.

i am entertaining sweet fantasies of me slaying him with my bare hands and teeth, after a hearty smiting and some loud recriminations.

except then…um…who would help with the baby?

so, crucifixion being an unfortunately unreasonable option, i resort to public shaming. bad Dave. bad, bad Dave. mad, mad Bonnie. stamps foot. sulks. begs you all to wag your fingers at him gloweringly.

perhaps i will just make him write all the Posey thank you cards himself.

my house is drowning.

or rather, i feel like my house is drowning…to the outside observer, it more likely looks a little cluttered, overstuffed. and dusty, definitely dusty. but i can live with the dustbunnies…we reached a detente years ago, where they keep to their corners and i keep to mine. it’s the clutter, the sense of being crowded in on by stuff, stuff everywhere, that makes me batshit crazy, turns my voice shrill and my eyes all deer in headlights. i have more tolerance for dental drilling than i do for clutter, especially clutter of the sort where there’s really nowhere left to put any frigging thing and you can no longer keep track of what half of it is for or where it would go.

i blame the children.

Josephine, it appears, was born with six suitcases worth of stuff to her name. i swear i didn’t buy it, much…it just materialized with celebrations and kindnesses, donations and gifts and hand-me-downs and my occasional breakdown in the face of wee smocked dresses on sale. Oscar, too, owns more clothes than i do, and seems to sing toys from the sky like birds.

or bird droppings. scattershot, they adorn our den helter-skelter, while i flap about the house trodding on Thomas the Tank Engine and squawking “confusion and delay!” in my best – if unintentional – Sir Topham Hatt imitation. Thomas at least has spent a solid year enthralling my offspring…the charms of others have not been so enduring. i didn’t realize how quickly kids outgrow their toys…that the Little People farm will not do him until he’s twelve, no matter whether i spent fifty bucks on it or not. in any case, old toys are banished to the shed to lie in wait for Posey or for loan to little cousins, and new ones arrive to take their place. the task of trying to squeeze them back into the house when Poe is ready looms like a date with my own personal idea of hell.

yesterday my half-sister, bless her, brought her rainforest swing for Josephine. it’s a gorgeous swing, almost new. the baby loves it. and it has a footprint the size of a small zeppelin…i’ve slept in rooms smaller than the floorspace that swing eats up. i’ve been hyperventilating since it arrived, trying to figure out which wall to knock out in order to make room for the bloody thing. i want it, don’t get me wrong. but i don’t want to give up the room for it. and when your house is twelve hundred square feet, room is not in infinite supply…thus clutter happens.

so much has come so easy. fifty years ago, families of four and five and six children were regularly raised in houses precisely this size, likely with fewer lamentations and a lot less clutter. my mother, who has not hesitated to inform me more than a few times that she got me through to toilet training with only a dozen thin old diapers and a wringer washer, stares in thinly veiled horror at the largesse of toys and outfits that her grandchildren possess. i shrug lamely and swear i didn’t buy it all, and she and i both recognize how lucky i am to be freed from the worry and want that haunted her all through my childhood.

but it’s too much, people. it is a joy and privilege to be able to give my kids some nice things…creature comforts, imaginative toys, cute clothes. i am in no way above the materialism of my world and my time…this age of indulgence that’s crept over all of us – or at least all of us who can lay our hands on credit – has left me thinking little of dropping dollars on things that please me. and things for my children please me. but when we live more simply than most people we know and i still have nightmares wherein colonizing, primary-coloured plastic toys eat me alive whilst playing tinny nursery rhyme tunes, there’s a problem somewhere. and maybe it’s not just that i’m disturbed.

recession scares me, sure. the shitkicking my savings have taken over the past month or so leaves a little tang of fear in my mouth so sour that my brain prefers not to consider the subject at all. but, at the same time, the Scots pioneer deep down in my soul feels freed by the prospect of reckoning, of forced frugality, of a retreat from a culture of such excess that my not-quite-six-week-old owns more stuff than whole families not so far from here whom fortune has not treated so generously. parenting as a consumer pastime is not what i want to be. i need less, folks, less than what i have.

we may all have to make do on less, and i don’t want to paint that as falsely rosy. for some, there is genuinely no wiggle room. but for many of us, less is a very relative term at this juncture…our less still more than any generation before us ever considered having, and much of it unnecessary. i hope our culture can use this downturn to do a little needed paring of our bloat, our clutter. i do not want my children to mistake all this for entitlement, or for happiness. and – for the sake of my sanity – i do not want to step on another godforsaken toy train.

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are you drowning? in stuff, or fear of what a downturn will mean?

she sleeps on me.

right from the word go, it’s been clear that Posey’s a snuggler, a natural bambino-in-arms. she burrows into chests and armpits with an instinctive fetal curl, an irrestibly tiny, hot package for whom human contact is a kind of morphine, a failsafe stupor-inducing comfort.

i am a sucker. Posey’s nuzzliness has charmed me to bits, in part because at two-and-a-half the affectionate but independent Oscar is still only learning to cuddle. my futile efforts to comfort him in his colicky infancy left me feeling inadequate and useless and, uh, desperate. thus my discovery of Little Miss Snugglebug’s penchant for getting cozy and peaceful when i held her flattered the ass off me. this child i can actually quiet please! worship my mothering skillz!

of course, turns out there’s a rub to this little trick. it’s not that Posey won’t sleep in her cute little cosleeper for long…no shit, Sherlock, i kinda figured i was getting in for that, i was game to reap the whirlwind…it’s that i can’t sleep through her sleeping.

every night for the two hours before dawn my child grunts like a barnful of pigs.

she gurgles and bellows three inches from my ears, her sonata of snorts punctuated only by occasional earsplitting shouts. it’s not hunger…she’s usually fed and been well and thoroughly burped only an hour or so before. and it doesn’t bother her much, as she sleeps through it – even the crying out, for the most part – so long as she’s held just right. but i cannot sleep through it, because a) she sounds like a motorcycle gang and b) i have to sit up in order to get her comfortable. her father also cannot sleep through it, because a) he’s only inches away and b) i tend to whack him awake whilst muttering curses under my breath because hell, i’ve only just gotten back to sleep and my frustration needs SOME outlet, after all. she hasn’t woken Oscar very often, admittedly – though the fact that she HAS, with no adjoining wall and two closed doors between them attests to the volume of her grunt sessions – but by the time her vocalizations have achieved their objective and gotten her diaper filled and she’s dropped back into gentle chest-snuggling sleepiness, it’s time for Oscar to wake up.

thus, there is not enough sleep going on here, folks. for me. and Dave too…but most – and oh so pitifully, i assure you, because Bon on no sleep is an ugly, ugly beast – me.

she has reflux, which medication appears to be taking care of. she also has tendencies towards loudness in whatever she does, and we affirm that around here. she’s not constipated, just voluminous, and possessed of unfortunate timing.

she’s five weeks old, and she delights me. and i have to admit i love having her little body resting beside me…love the sound of her breath, the flutter of her small hands as they inevitably break free from the swaddle. even in the dark of five am, i catch the shadowy contours of her small face and am grateful. but tired. i’m wearing thin. so…anybody have any wonderful tips which will restore beauty sleep to our little family? i tried prune juice (uh, for Posey, not me…but it just made the product of her grunting all the more watery) and i tried earplugs (pointless, due to the proximity of the noise source and the fact that she’s five weeks old and i’m not comfortable with the possibility of her being awake and miserable and alone). anybody got any other bright ideas?

and more seriously, since i don’t think Oscar’s ever slept on me for more than five minutes in his entire life, any voice-of-experience stories about the wisdom or lack thereof of letting her sleep in our arms in the first place?

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the US. i don’t think the day has any official status here in Canada, and this year we’re too busy reeling from a ‘more things change the more they stay the same’ election up in these parts to see much in the news about it, even if our government were on board. but the Wave of Light that marks the day is an international affair. at seven pm tonight, across every time zone around the world, people are invited to light candles in honour of little ones loved, missed, remembered.

the candle i light for Finn will be propped in a kitschy Hallowe’en pumpkin candle, because Hallowe’en floats Oscar’s boat these days. it’s in questionable taste, perhaps…but that’s what you get for being born into this family, i figure. if Finn were here, we’d be planning his costume this time of year, and he and his younger brother might be torturing each other deliciously with scary talk of ghosts. instead, our ghosts are all too real and yet all too absent. and with the candle, i am trying to say you’re a part of us, son, wherever you are, whatever you’ve crossed over to. you are loved, always. you are not forgotten. there is nothing else left for me to say, any longer.

i don’t write much about Finn these days. i have reached a place where i am no longer blown apart, where the scars have closed over and left me once more whole, if tempered; rent and healed and beyond the fire now. i do not grieve like i did…do not rail and wail and gnash my teeth at the universe, do not ache with a hurt too big. i am no longer the subject of that crushing blow of loss. i’m shamed by the selfishness of the implication that i ever was…because it was him who was the subject of his own death, after all, but i grieved for my self just as much as i grieved for him.

it is harder, sometimes, to reconcile with life, with living, than it is with death.

it was hardest for me to reconcile with the silence that came after his death, with the unspeakable awkwardness of the world with the fact of that death. my childless motherhood was the darkest place i have ever been.

i am not there, and so i do not write of it. partly because the need doesn’t spring raw and desperate from me anymore…and i am wary to disturb the peace. but i wonder, too, if it is unseemly to keep revisiting the subject…if it tires people to hear of a dead baby when i have two lovely living ones. i fear judgement and others’ sense of decorum just as i fear betraying the memory of a child who has only me and his father, really, to remember him at all. the fact of his death still sits awkwardly with the world, i know…i am reminded each time i broach it and am met with an urgent subject change, with others’ discomfort. it does not hurt me anymore…but it is sad. and it silences.

this afternoon, holding Josephine close at the end of a mommy-baby yoga class, October light slanting in on the hardwood floor, i breathed in the traces of newborn scent that still linger in her hair and thought of him. firstborn. the first newborn head i ever nuzzled like that, only gingerly, extra-tenderly. for months after i kept his tiny hat from the NICU and i buried my face in it and drank in the faint traces of him. it was proof that he’d been here. and yet it was a secret act. i did not want to be the crazy lady with the dead baby.

what Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day and the Wave of Light does is allow me to bring Finn – and my love for him, all that broken, bittersweet love – out of that darkness and silence, that private closet of sorrow. it legitimizes the breach of decorum, takes the onus off the individual, points out that this kind of loss is not so isolated and unusual as our happy-ending culture would like to believe.

with a Hallowe’en candle it includes him, holds him in the light.

as do we.

before Posey was born, i wouldn’t have bet that i’d still be nursing her four weeks in. i would’ve hoped for it, rather like i hope for world peace and a flat stomach and the magical rebound of my ever-more-paltry retirement investments, but i’d given myself The Permission this time around. formula is not rat poison, i had repeated like a mantra over the last weeks of pregnancy. nobody else gives two shits what you feed your child, went my litany, and it ain’t their business if they do. i coached myself, prepped myself, stomped down the sanctimonious little voices inside my head. i’m all about the goodness of breastmilk, i intoned, but a little mental health is good too. i really was game to try breastfeeding again – i even bought me a big ol’ rocking glider to try to make it all delightful and comfy and such – but in my darkest heart, my expectations were low.

turns out nothing creates satisfaction like looooow expectations, friends.

Oscar and i had a slow, hard start to nursing, compounded by prematurity and colic and my inexperience. at six weeks old he was still on the breast for an hour out of every two, around the clock, and if he wasn’t sleeping (rare) or crying (frequent), he was nursing. despite reflux meds and the elimination of dairy (sniff!) and wheat from my diet, he suffered from diarrhea and was just generally miserable for the first few months of his life. and so was i. and i was too ashamed to admit it, especially after i spilled my sweet merciful jesus he eats twelve hours a day and i’m frayed and exhausted and overwhelmed Book of Job to an enthusiastic lactation consultant and got a bland “oh, that’s normal” and the sound of chirping crickets for my troubles. i thought, i’m weak and plugged on, until he was hospitalized for the diarrhea and he got a taste for their fancy formula and i never quite re-established my supply and so we started giving a few bottles a day and glory be, suddenly i could actually shower! and fold laundry! but the guilt was hot and heavy because i was a Natural Kind of Girl and so i nursed and bottle-fed in a strange tango until over time it all became easy and normal and colic left the building and i stopped feeling like a stressed-out failure. in the end i nursed him until he was fourteen months, but only first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. that, i loved.

i may enjoy a little self-indulgent self-flagellation as much as the next blogger, but i wasn’t gonna go through all that again. hence The Permission. my baby would get breastmilk for exactly as long as procuring said breastmilk was a sane experience, and no longer. no guilt. happy mama, happy baby, blah blah blah. and i tried, i really did. i gave express permission for Posey to be topped up with formula a few times in the hospital, when jaundice hit and my milk still wasn’t in, and when she came home barely able to wake to nurse, we tried a few bottles to get her through. but she wasn’t hugely interested. this little girl wants boobies…and she’s a more efficient nurser than Oscar was even at four months old, so the experience isn’t such an endurance run each time. therefore, i’m readjusting my expectations, and occasionally fighting off the odd sensation that i’ve failed at giving myself permission to fail.

the only real problem with breastfeeding – raw nipples and gloriously alluring nursing bras aside – is that my mind wanders when my hands can’t. i’d forgotten the stasis of it all. i’ve never mastered nursing lying down, or hands-free, and until Josephine can hold her head up, it’s pretty much a hands-full job for me. and i’m not a tv person…so i sit, withering on the vine, thinking. it’s dangerous, especially in a state of sleep-deprivation. my brain flits, making grocery lists, trying to ignore dustbunnies, composing posts that i know will never be written because i’ll have forgotten them by the time i actually can free up two fingers to poke at a keyboard. i mostly pass the time by gazing at my newborn, but even if this breastfeeding relationship is thus far pretty successful and sane, the gazing itself feeds neuroses. i obsess while gazing, engage in flagrant flights of fancy…imagining what the tiny squashed-tomato face in front of me will morph into with age, whether her eyebrows will darken, if her snub nose will grow pointy like my own, whether that double chin is for real or just hiding what will someday be a perfectly reasonable neck. stick legs, bald spots, ear fuzz, gummy grin, monkey toes…in the dark hours of the night, when her sweet little maw gapes insatiably, my tired brain fixates on the surreal dysmorphias of infancy and worries that my child will grow up to be a circus geek.

i know better. when Oscar was born, he had no eyelashes – his newborn peepers were bald as little eggs. i fretted. i like eyelashes, have a definite aesthetic bias in that direction. i feared my child had lost the genetic lottery and would have to suffer through life with a gaze unfringed, like a plucked chicken. this bothered me more than i let on, and every nursing session – twelve eternal, mind-numbing hours a day – i sat pinned and half-unhinged, inspected the infant Oscar minutely for signs of impending eye fluff. eventually they came, his lashes. eventually it settled, my mind.

but all these hours of feeding spent peering at this tiny face, these funny wee toes? they’re a lot for a fertile imagination to bear. perhaps this time around i ought to pony up for cable tv.
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would cable actually help? those of you who’ve spent hours feeding babies through the years…how did you pass the time in your own head? is my fixation with my offsprings’ aesthetics during periods of prolonged exposure just a weird little tic unique to me?

we traipsed into the woods like Hansel and Gretel…except, well, we were the parents. with our mini-me folk in tow. and there was no gingerbread house to be found.

that, and getting lost in the woods in PEI is damn near impossible because if you keep walking you will, indubitably, end up either on a beach or smack-dab in the middle of some nice farmer’s field. with cows.

but still, the woods. and we were trespassing because the only hiking trail i know of around here is part of a government park that’s currently – alas – for sale and locked down for the season so really we were far more wary of park rangers than witches but then, i have authority issues anyway. and there was the smell of pine needles and the slip of moss on old roots underfoot and i remembered coming out to this trail an angsty high school emo kid with my emo friends to write tortured poetry and commune with nature but damn, i did not remember the trail being so steep or my sad legs so jiggly.

nor did i remember the woods being so silent…not a squirrel in sight, to Oscar’s crushing disappointment. nor a birdsong to be heard.

and i wonder if the gumdrop houses haven’t eaten them all up.

today is Posey’s due date. it’s also my mom’s 60th birthday.

in my first pregnancy, with Finn, my due date was a source of excitement and mystery. the 4th of August, proclaimed the calendar – or maybe the 3rd, but the 4th was Dave’s mom’s birthday and so we went with that, thinking how fortuitous, how cool – and it never so much as occurred to me that i might deliver anytime before August rolled around in all its grand and bloated swelter.

but when August did roll in that year, we were three months bereaved…shell-shocked still, hurting, trying to put together some semblance of a life. i don’t remember if we ever managed to send Dave’s mom a card for her birthday that year.

when i got pregnant with Oscar a short while later, i barely noted his due date. instead i counted the weeks until viability, the days until we passed the points at which leaking had begun or the airlift had happened…and the 26+1 mark at which Finn had been born. i burned into my brain the date at which we’d clear the 28w hurdle, after which so much goes so much better. that was all i was bold enough to ask for.

but then time had her sweet, merciful dulling way with me and when i got pregnant again last fall, due at the end of June, i was fool enough to imagine a baby born on my grandmother’s birthday, the 20th…a full-term, 39ish-week baby. instead, on a Friday in late November, the day Dave turned 33, the u/s technician turned her face away from us as she spun the empty screen in our direction.

so on the morning of my 36th birthday this past January, when i woke up jet-lagged and bleary and faintly nauseous at a bizarre and ungodly hour in a hotel in England, and quietly and with hammering hopeful, fearful heart peed on a plastic stick i’d brought with me because i am at all times prepared, i didn’t dare shout out to the sleeping Dave dude! i’m pregnant! due on my mom’s birthday! i didn’t want to think too much about due dates, then…just wanted to get through that day, and the next, without blood. i only casually mentioned the congruence of dates to my mother much later, but with the caveat we’re really just trying to get safely to August. and she nodded. she knew.

but today my mom is sixty and her granddaughter is 23 days old and a whopping 7 pounds, 2 ounces and there will be cake and i am grateful, humbled by this happy ending, this coda to my pregnancy and to the whole journey of pregnancy in general, for me. we end with cake, not tears. and my mom is celebrating her seventh decade by getting her first computer so i’m bringing the blog out of the closet as a way of introducing her to this fascinating network that is teh internets (note to mom: intentional spelling mistake) so…wish her a happy birthday if you have a minute.

and tell me…all of you, whether your pregnancies were full-term or cut short, whether you’ve lost or gone over and delivered beautiful, healthy babies…did you note your due dates as they passed? do you think of them? what’s your relationship to this semi-arbitrary spot on the calendar?

the last day of September already.

this month brought her to us, and its close makes me sentimental, wary, resistant…as if the turn of the calendar might make her vanish, too, ephemeral, something only dreamed.

perhaps it is because she is my last baby, and i know this smallness will never be granted me again. perhaps it is because she looks a little like her eldest brother, fuzzy brown head, one eye half-cocked and peeking, and i am still and forever raw and fearful, over-protective. perhaps it is simply because it is autumn and the leaves are falling, melancholy and woodsmoke in the air. perhaps i am a mess of hormones, is all.

before she was born, i’d say quite happily to anyone who would listen that i’m not really a baby person. i love the age that Oscar’s at, love the interaction and the playfulness and the language and the give-and-take of learning limits. what i remembered of O’s infancy was mostly the months of colic and my own exhaustion, my sense of helplessness and bewilderment.

i forgot, though, that in those moments i still felt the magic of his newborn-ness, still mourned the passing of his two-week and four-week and six-week milestones, because i knew they would never come again.

my daughter will be three weeks old tomorrow. i think we have thrush, and the fatalist in me is poised to welcome colic like a bad party guest once her due date rolls around. and yet, if i could freeze these days, stay here in this weary, blurry, blessed baby state where her head smells milky and sweet and her small body curls into me at all hours, hot and soft and mewling…oh, today i would.

i didn’t realize he’d suddenly seem so HUGE.

i didn’t realize how ambivalent i’d feel about that, about his seemingly shocking catapult leap from my baby to this…boy. this boy, this big, solid, willful boy with a sweet streak who’s coping with the arrival of his sibling relatively gracefully, really, but also bringing out the big guns of no and i can’t hear you mama and i’m not going to sleep past 5:45 am nyah nyah nyah thank you very much, ma’am so that my exhausted brain sometimes clamps down on him more sharply than it ought, labelling new behaviors manipulative where really, i can see how they make sense, how they’re a reasonable use of the tools in his arsenal given the upheaval around this place in the last two weeks.

i just didn’t know that, looming over the frail stick limbs of his newborn sister, my boy could seem foreign, could trigger my mama bear protective response against him. ouch. he was here first, says my heart. she’s so breakable, it counters in the same breath, a house divided.

and still he trots over in the morning cooing “my baby!” and even if the proffered kiss is not for me and this decentering has us both a little shaken my heart warms to see him take it all in stride as best he can, facing the world with his chin out like he does, my sunny kid with the hands like meathooks. i marvel at how those paws got so big without me even noticing, each day an increment until the whole escaped me and i wonder if he isn’t secretly sixteen already and i’ve just failed to keep up?

then i stand back and look and am shocked to realize, he’s still little too.

both of us are wandering a strange and tilting path these days, negotiating a family structure in which our roles have shifted, been altered forever. and a part of me longs for space alone with him, not my firstborn but still my first in so many ways, my little boy, my O, my Other. something about the change leaves me with a nagging feeling of anxiety, like in this new completeness and contentment i’d overlooked or undersold the whole that was Oscar and i, bargained it off permanently, irrevocably. in a sense, maybe i have. but then i remember that he has always shared that space of the whole with shadow siblings, his elder brother gone but so present in Oscar’s early days, this always-wanted second – third – child hoped for from the beginning. my guilty heart breathes a sigh of relief, and reads from the Second-Time-Around Parents’ Handbook, Standard Version…what Oscar is to me has not been changed by Josephine…only the lens through which i can focus on him, see him. and it will take time for that to feel balanced again. repeat. catch self. blink back tears at sight of elder child running across lawn like young gazelle, pointing out how fleeting all this is.

we have time, it seems. it seems they will keep growing, these miraculous creatures, the two of them.

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i never really had a brother, though. i have two half-brothers, both younger, one so much so that i was his babysitter and doted on him when they visited in summertimes…but distance made them more like cousins than siblings. i remember some twinges of jealousy when the younger was born…but they were the jealousy of a child who does not have a father feeling replaced by a sibling who will. i do not think i know what it is to be Oscar right now. nor do i have any real expectations of his relationship with Posey. all my female friends growing up – almost without exception – were eldest daughters. all my significant long-term relationships with men – which, admittedly, can be counted on one hand – have been with onlies or with the babies of the family. so i’ve got no model from which to imagine a relationship between a brother and sister, especially one where there’s only a couple of years between the two. and i wonder…is this like having a cat and a dog, or two birds of a feather? will they play together? like each other? drive each other crazy? be there for each other when Dave & i (knock wood) grow old?

i know only the two of them, as individuals, will work out the answers. and yet brothers are such foreign country for me that i cannot imagine anything beyond today, beyond the curly blond head bending to kiss the tiny dark one, and the endless refrain of “is she big enough yet, mama?”

tell me. tell me of brothers and sisters.

babybird

she doesn’t need much.

milk, Zantac for her nasty, nasty reflux, diapers, a warm chest to cuddle into. she wears her brother’s preemie-size handmedowns for now, mostly blue…though kind friends and family have ensured she will have more pink than i ever dreamed of to grow into once she gets out of doll-sized clothing. which should be soon…she’s back up to her birthweight as of today, clocking in at about the weight of a diner lunch. she’s pretty enamored of her car seat, way more than the sweet little nest of a co-sleeper by the bed, no matter how i prop it up. but mostly she sleeps on me. and since this is our last time around the baby block – and i’d sell my hindquarters cheap right now just for unbroken rest in any form – i’m cool with that.

she has old soul eyes, this one. she stares, searchingly, like the one thing she needs is to know the world is a decent place. it’s a tautology to tell her that it seems that way to me because she’s in it. i look around me and all i got for those eyes right now is the weary, abiding love in this little zone of sanctuary and the sweetness new babies bring out in the most unlikely people and i pull what is precious to me tighter and hope that her serious, wary gaze finds beauty to light on in this life.

that’s what i’d like to give her.

but a beloved old buddy is throwing a shower – my first, ever – since we work amongst mutual friends now. and people are asking what this baby needs, what i need, in the manner of things that can be wrapped and opened. and i am grateful…but terrible at these things, eternally gauche when it comes to being the gracious recipient. my instinct is to tell everyone to just bring baby wipes or a donation to charity…or yeh, gee, that $150 swing in the catalogue looks gorgeous. erm, yeh. i have wants, see…but guilt, too. there really isn’t anything we need…we’re lucky. very, very lucky. plus my Scotch Protestant roots demand we get “good use” out of everything i’ve ever bought so it’s painful for me to retire any item before it yelps and sags and cries “uncle”. and yet…this time around i splurged and bought a cheap nursing rocker with footstool, and i’m already kicking myself for thinking i didn’t need one with O…no wonder i had that backache for three months, nursing on a futon couch after eons of bedrest. so sometimes stuff is good. somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous, there’s got to be some cool baby stuff that’s moderately green-ish and not too greedy that we’re missing out on knowing about here at chez crib? or at least that i can tell people about so they can bask in the joy of shopping?

leak the good stuff, friends. if you had cool baby items or can’t-live-without things for your babies, what were they? what made life with a little one easier for you?