Oh, The Humanity...

It may not sound like much, but KG and I got out of the house today, in what to us felt like a honest-to-goodness miracle.  To start the day, we attended a meeting of new parents at the hospital where we'd had the baby.  It was, I have to tell you, so wonderfully humanizing to listen to other newbie parents speak, even about the most mundane of matters.  Many of them were the sorts of people we would almost never have come into contact with otherwise but, as my friend Eric pointed out later, at the moment all of our lives had become small in exactly the same way. 

On the way home, KG and I snuck in lunch at a local diner before the little guy woke up.  Later in the day - the absolute cherry on top - we swaddled the baby and took him for a walk around the neighborhood.  You can't imagine how quickly the outside world becomes a foreign place.  Just before we got home, we rested briefly in front of our next-door neighbor's little fountain.   The three of us sat in silence and listened to the water running.  KG explained to Henry what that sound was.

The past week had been a rough one.  Our pediatrician had put the baby on a grueling feeding schedule, hoping he'd gain weight more rapidly.  It ended up working (we returned to a normal feeding schedule on Friday), but in the interim poor KG had to feed the little guy every three hours and pump in between.  For five days, she rarely got more than an hour-and-a-half worth of sleep at a time; and those were the good stretches.  I tried to pick up the slack in every other department and we both ran ourselves ragged.  

So to simply engage in the world and feel like people again, as small as that may seem, was both a relief and a blessing.  Who knew: The world is full of lovely things.

Orchid (courtesy of Bill and Anita) and a youthful KG