Its a Onederful Life

I spent yesterday afternoon shopping for supplies for Baby Girl's upcoming birthday party. I'm usually not much of a shopper and I'm generally not a very girly girl, but there was something about ordering pink balloons, buying pink utensils, and paging through pink decorations to adorn Baby Girl's cake that made me deliriously happy. Truth be told, the elation could also have been from the Starbucks coffee running through my blood combined with the thought of the three child-free hours that stretched out in front of me as I ran those errands. Regardless, I happily bought a lot of pink. My mom, a confirmed pink aficionado and a woman who loved to shop, would have been tickled pink. It was fun. As I went about my shopping, planning for the party we are about to have to celebrate the one year anniversary of my baby girl's arrival into the world, I realized that I wasn't nearly as sad about reaching this milestone as I had envisioned I would be.

It's not that I'm not sad at all, of course. Raising children is essentially one long process of letting go and birthdays are always a little bittersweet. I'm hanging on to Baby Girl's babyhood where I can. I haven't, for example, been able to put away the sleepers she used in her first few months home. I've put away the rest of the clothes she's grown out of, but not those sleepers. Every once in a while I sneak into her room and pick up a sleeper and smell it and I am instantly transported back in time to those first surreal moments after she came home when the whole world seemed to shrink to just her and I and the love that emanated immediately from and for this tiny little being took over everything else. There is a period of time after a baby comes home when the outside world ceases to exist and you are seduced into believing that the whole world is full of the magic and possibilities that seem to surround you as you smell your baby's skin. (I will pause here to note that it's entirely possible that at least some of this bliss was post-cesarean Vicodin induced. But you know what I mean). So I can't put those sleepers away. I can't let that feeling go. Not yet.

And I officially retired my pump this week. We're not completely done nursing, but we're trying to cut back to morning and bedtime nursing only. There is no sadness involved in the actual retiring of the pump; I disliked pumping as much I loved nursing (and I loved nursing a lot). The tasks associated with that pump seemed endless. Bottles, and bags, and washing, and lugging, and freezing and thawing again. So I will not miss the pump. But I will miss what it represented. I *love* the closeness of nursing. I love being able to take a hungry little girl, feed her from my own body, and know that I had the power within me to give her exactly what she needed to feel completely satisfied. As long as I am nursing, I can do that for her. I can give her *everything* that she needs,without needing a single thing from outside of myself. I love being able to do that for her. The older she gets, the harder it will be to give her what she needs, to make her feel safe and loved and warm solely by giving myself to her. There is such a simplicity to the first year of life. I will miss that immensely.

So of course I am a bit nostalgic for what I am leaving behind. But mostly, I'm excited about what is ahead. I'm sure this is in part because Baby Girl has already evolved from a baby into a little girl. A little girl with really cute pig tails, to boot. And she is *such* a joyful toddler. She wakes up and goes to sleep with a smile on her face, gives us all kisses whenever we ask, and explores the world with a vigor that is quite simply a delight to watch. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to watch her grow from a tiny baby into a little girl; the road to Baby Girl was long and not a day goes by that I don't remind myself of how extraordinarily blessed I am to have her in my life.

I think my easy acceptance of Baby Girl's first birthday is in also in part due to the perspective I gained from watching Joseph grow from a teeny tiny baby boy into a nearly self-sufficient five- year-old. I am still stunned to realize how swiftly the years have gone by. Experiencing this first hand has taught me that trying to hold onto time is like trying to grasp water running through your hands: as hard as you may try, the feat is simply impossible. The best you can do is immerse yourself in the water, surrender to the feeling of it flowing over your body, and enjoy it while it lasts. That is the perspective I tried to bring into mothering Baby Girl. It gave me tolerance for the imbalance in our lives that the newborn stage created. Rather than flounder in it, I accepted it. I ate it up. I loved the crazy as much as I could. I gave myself over to that tiny little newborn baby girl. I let her drink from me and sleep with me and take nearly everything I had. And when I had to go back to work, I let myself come home, take her into my arms, and spend the rest of the night on the couch just holding her, ignoring the dishes that would go undone. I gave myself permission to say "no" to extra work, "no" to dinners out, "no" to any of those things that would mean more time away from her. All because I knew that this moment-- her one year old birthday-- would come sooner than I could possibly imagine and that when it came, I would want to know that I had lived those moments as fully as I could.