success and challenge

Laurie has been using the idea of documenting the day's successes and challenges in her daily posts, and tonight I'm extra tired and have a cold, so I'm just going to steal the premise from her.

Today's success for me was focusing on a single task during my babysitter time. I printed a bunch of burlap labels for new baguette bags and other sewing projects I'm working on for the farmer's market. This was made easier by setting everything up for myself yesterday. Tonight while we watched This Emotional Life, I started the hours of ironing that lie ahead of me. I don't usually have the capacity to work at night, but maybe it was fueled by another success:

an easy bedtime. Korin reminded me to give the boys some homeopathic chamomila before bed, and I don't know if that's what did it, but it was a deliciously easy, and happy, sleepytime for the boys.

My greatest challenge today was probably that I just couldn't think of anything novel to do with the boys this afternoon. They both had unusually short naps, so they were tearful, clingy and grouchy, and having something interesting on-hand would have been good. Instead, we ended up just going on a long walk in the light rain, which was just fine for all of us.

It would have been nice to have kids when I was in my 20s - my creative energy was so powerful back then, and I know I would have had all sorts of homemade games at the ready. It's not like I didn't try, though, so we'll all just have to deal with me being a tired old mum! ;)

And today's photo:
This morning a friend asked some of us to send her our birth photos. Looking back through that visual record of the boys birth was full of emotion. This photo made me remember the moment, probably a half an hour after they were born, when I was finally out of recovery and allowed into the resuscitation room next to the OR. I asked the nurse:

Can I touch him?

It stirs a well of sadness that I didn't get to even touch my boys until that moment, and that it took hours after that for me to be able to hold them. I don't think about this often, nor do I really feel traumatized by our birth and NICU experience, but remembering the barriers of separation between me and my babies really is very sad for all three of us.

I wonder if I will have the opportunity to give birth to another child, and whether we will have that skin-to-skin moment of birth and those lingering hours of mama-baby connection afterward.