Sweet Baby Breath on my Shoulder

I went to our La Leche League meeting this evening. I have been to hundreds of LLL meetings in the last 38 years. They are all the same in that the focus is on breastfeeding.  They are all different because someone will have a question you haven't heard.  Someone else will have a question you have heard a million times, but is new to this and the other new moms in the room.

There are first time moms with their precious newborns.  There are pregnant moms so full of confidence and fear.  What kind of mother will I be.  What if the baby doesn't like me.  Will it hurt.  Any of it, all of it.

The second or third time moms are there too, including the mom who went into labor at one of our meetings a couple of years ago.

This evening, one mom, a second time mom, was having a bit of frustration when her baby fussed but didn't know what was wrong.

I offered to hold the baby to let him settle on my chest- my non-lactation chest.  Soft and warm.  Head of fluff resting on my shoulder.  Nuzzling his head with my nose for that indescribable new baby scent. 

Mom was able to relax.  I was relaxed by holding the baby.  Being a mom.  That is what I am.  But differently than I had really expected.  Oh the baby part was not so different.  It was just intense.  The love, the glue, the primal feeling in your blood that this baby is part of you, part of your body.   Amazing.

When I was in Oregon in July, having dinner at Courtney's house, Courtney pulled out an old copy of Bleak House.  There was writing inside the front cover as well as in the back cover.

The page with the numbers, is in Nick's hand writing.  It was our counting and timing contractions waiting to meet Courtney.   The other page is something that Nick wrote.

I will share the pages here and then I will go to bed.  Maybe I will dream of all the hours I was lucky enough to cradle those wonderful babies that Nick and I bore together.

Nick's poem to his first born

Timing contractions