The mommy gland

So, I finally get the "sleeping like a baby" cliche.  They can sleep anywhere, in the face of all your plans, unexpectedly, with little regard to either noise or motion, and there's nothing you can do about it.  Well, nothing that you will do about it.  Yesterday we sat in the car, in a supermarket parking lot, then drove around aimlessly, all to let the boy sleep where he was, in his car seat.  It was yet another rainy day, as is today, so far.  What else were we going to do?  The little guy is really starting to like us.  He seems so happy to meet our eyes, to be near us, to hear our voices.  For the first two months he was somewhat oblivious.  I thought that maybe he was just being dismissive of me.  It turns out that this is all quite normal.  All babies are contemptuous of their parents.  It's science.

I joke, of course.  But it's a partial truth.  The first couple months we were lucky to have his eyes meet ours and even when they did there seemed to be no spark of recognition.  That's all changed now.  He seems to love nothing more than looking at, and being talked to, by myself and Rachel.  He even mimicked me yesterday, though that very well might have been entirely coincidental.  I said, "Hi!" to him and he echoed the sound back to me.  I'm certain it was just chance and he seems far too young to actually be trying to mimic sounds yet, but Rachel and I didn't care. We were swooning with love for him.  It's really amazing, the feeling of connection that's developing.  To see the recognition of us in his eyes is staggeringly wonderful.

Ha! Coincidentally, I just got a call from Selavy.  He was reminding me that my life is not my own any longer, and nobody will want me to express anything but love for the child and the wife on this site any more. There will be no room left on here for me.  Expressing anything - individual, unique or worse, unpleasant - about myself will be increasingly discouraged.  In time I will only be recounting how happy I am to be going to work.  He assures me of this.  Not that I will actually be happy about going to work, but it will exclusively become the thing that people will allow me to write about, job happiness and security.

Just as I was going to begin the third paragraph of this post the call came in.  I was going to write about how much I resent going to work, not because I hate the job, but because I want to spend more time with the boy, and with Rachel.  I rarely get two days off consecutively any more, so each day exists under the pressure to make the most of it, in whatever way I can.  Whether I succeed or fail matters very little, work returns the next day and I am off and running again into it.  Always running to or from it.  

Ah, to enjoy the daily glow of love... I just went and took Rhys out of Rachel's arms and held him.  Moving him around one too many times, attempting to find the best way to hold him, he started to cry.   I tried to console him but it was no use.  He began to howl in spasmodic bursts. A sort of infant wailing, punctuated by convulsions of dissatisfaction.  Only titty was going to get us out of this one.  Titties take the tears away.

We notice that some of what Rachel eats makes its way through the breast milk to Rhys and upsets his stomach.  So I'm trying to convince Rachel to only ingest baby formula but she's not as warm to the idea as I am.  I have come to view her body as a wonderful opportunity in child-raising experimentation, a living and breathing lab from which I can safely test, and take note of the various results.  She is much more tempered in her curiosity of such things.  She is the Felix Unger to my Oscar Madison when it comes to how the child will be fed, fastidious in her daily approach to nursing.  

It is a wonderful thing to witness though, the calming therapeutic effect of titty time. 

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