Zuzu at 7 months

It's hard to believe this baby has been part of our family only a little more than half a year. The time has gone by so quickly but at the same time it feels like we've been a family-of-three for always.

The first three disorienting months were something I wasn't ready for--the post-partum depression, the hormones the hormones the hormones! I write a five year journal, and looking back at my entries from that time I don't think there was ever a time in my life that I was less myself.

Thankfully, hormones pass. My body becomes once again my body.  and I become myself again, a place where I can relax into this role God's blessed me with.

~

7 month old Zuzu crawls after the kittys, crawls to explore, crawls to find new things to put in her mouth. She's got two bottom teeth and no signs of the top ones yet; we like to call her two-toof-McGee.

She's 75th percentile in everything but height (90th--tall girl, like her Grammie), and she started not only crawling but pausing to sit on her own too, just in the past few days.

Mobility, our new foe.

~

I love being a mother.

I have a cousin hemming around the idea of starting her family; she tells me she wants to travel, to have savings, to have adventures.

Bryan and I didn't do a lot of that before Zuzu, but I don't regret it; there's an awful lot of adventure to be found here.

~

Last week I taught Sylvia Plath in class and I decided to go over "Morning Song."

Love set you going like a fat gold watch...

I remember reading that poem years ago, in college, when I first read Plath, and skimming over it, ho-hum, I thought.

Now, years later, when I read over it in preparing for my class, I thought oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, I've lived that.

moth-breath, Sylvia calls it. Isn't that exactly exactly the feeling of a newborn's fluttering first breaths on your collarbone as you are rocking her to sleep?

I still haven't found the word for the weight of my sleeping child in my arms; if there is a word for it, it is something akin to moth-breath, I think.