4.5

4.5 to watch you blossom

Exploding in vivid color like a bird of paradise bloom.

4.5 from way too tiny to oh, so tall

4.5 to see you change from needing to giving

Taking all I have and more but giving me . . . giving more.

4.5 of big failures and big successes

4.5 of doing days together

Thinking of all that number holds, 4.5, delightful child.

From the Draft Folder

This one has set in the draft folder since 5 November 2009. I think that's plenty long enough, so here it is in honor of World Breastfeeding Week 2010.

Don't Want to Forget

I don't ever want to forget

That she called them Waa, and then MommaWaa, and then Yummies, and finally the were her Yums.

That she named them Jack and Jill, and she loved them.

That when I laid her down, the imprint of her ear would be pressed into my arm just below my elbow and I always wanted to be brave enough to get it tattooed there.

Her sleep eating.

How angry I felt sometimes, and how I had to learn to listen to what both our bodies needed.

How I thought it would never end and then it did.

Published at http://theleakyboob.com/2010/08/dont-ever-want-to-forget/.

No Weed Killer Here

It has taken me awhile, but I am beginning to realize that choosing to not use poisons means that my garden will have more weeds. It just will. But the long term benefits are more than worth the obvious fact that my strawberry patch has weeds to pull. The same is true with my daughter.

Father Daughter Dance

I can hear their muffled voice upstairs

Cadence and Call that is all theirs

Neither of them know that they

Are the only spot still sane in the other's awful day

Grabbing on to the only branch

Big and little little

Flitting like their words into each other

safe Here

Father Daughter Dance

I See What She Has Made of Him.

I adore Saturday mornings.

When Baby is Daddy's and I am an outsider looking in.

Never understanding, sometimes questioning, in awe.

Of her little girl love, and his big man strength.

The parts of her that make him soft, and the parts of him that make her tall.

Of the way they talk and walk and play and fight and love

So different from me.

And I think

the greatest gift mom can give girl (now so blonde, so alive, so wild)

is Dad who can love her.

In arms, Dee and Raynie, each the other's whole world, perfectly fit together.

Too many words spoil things, but

it always comes back to this -- I wonder what she will become,

So loved.

"The "You are Stoopid" Love and Why it Wins"

http://adventuresinmercy.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/the-you-are-stoopid-love-and-why-it-wins/

Linking this so I can read it over, and over, and over . . . .