None of us knows what happens before we become conscious on this earth. I will be the first to admit that I know very little about anything. All of the girls at my house, however, like to believe that we come from the same place to which we will return when we leave this earth. My little girls like to imagine that they were all friends in a different realm before they met on Earth as sisters. We like to collectively tell the story of how the three of them looked down from heaven where they were probably seated on a cloud and surveyed life on the earth below. "Look," one of them says, "Those two are going to be our parents. They seem nice." The other two agree. Emma, being the dominant, adventurous type, decides that she should be the firstborn child in our family. We pause to reflect on what a stubborn, grouchy, and serious baby our beautiful Emma was, and she reminds me that she was obviously just missing the sisters that she left...
For years we hemmed and hawed about having another baby. We knew it would be lots of work. We feared it might negatively impact the dynamics of our family. We never dreamed it would wreak such havok on my body, but that's another story. Finally, two Christmases ago, we decided, YES, let's have another baby... someone little and sweet who coos and giggles. What we got, although wonderful, was not what we were expecting. Lili is a baby who does not fancy being a baby. She has something to prove. She crawled at seven months, stood up a week later, and appears downright annoyed that we expect her to be a "baby" for an entire year. See the above photo?? This is a rarity. Unless she is starving and being offered something exceptionally delicious, Lili will NOT take food off of a spoon offered by someone else. She has also given up her high chair. After wrestling her into it several times and receiving her telepath...
It hasn't been the best week for me. I really thought I had navigated safely through the third baby postpartum stage with a minimum of tears and drama... and then I woke up on Thursday morning and nothing was right. I was slightly feverish, completely tearful... and those "blocked ducts" I had been complaining about were even worse. It also happened to be the day that George was supposed to go back to work. I rang my community midwife to see if she could pay me a visit. After blubbering on the phone to her for several minutes about my milk ducts which I thought had been painfully blocked for over a week, she suggested that I go over to Llandough Hospital to the breast clinic. I agreed to this, then hung up the phone and cried for an hour. (Meanwhile George had gone to register Lili's birth at the Cardiff registrar's office. There was a also a decorator downstairs painting the walls while all of our downstairs furniture sat, piled in disarray in the dining room.) I...
Comments