starting work

I am going back to work on Monday.  Emma is five and a half months old, and I think she is ready to stay with a caregiver for three to four hours a day, so that I can do half a day's work in the afternoons.  My mom is coming up from Vancouver to help look after her for a month and a half, and then she will be with my friend's mom.  All good in the world of wonderland.

That being said, I feel very sad about leaving her, even if it is not for long.  She is becoming such a sweet, loving child, and I adore laying next to her for the afternoon nap, smelling her head, tracing the outline of her nose with my finger, breathing next to her little breath and letting her hand rest on my face.  We are like a perfect unit, after so long we have become the perfect unit, and I hate to leave my place in the relationship, even for a very little while, to be filled by a substitute.

I do think it will be good for both of us though:  for me, because I am a professional woman who needs to bring in some dough and exert her evil ways on people other than my own husband, for her because she belongs in society, and as much as I would like to keep her tied to my hip forever, I know that eventually she needs to form relationships with others, and take her place in society as an individual.  Within limits, this starts early, and why not now?

I am toying with the idea of bringing her and the caregiver to my office where I have a spare room.  I am fairly certain that I will do it, at least to try, and if it is too small a space, too stifling, then I will abandon the plan.  But having her close to me will be such a wonderful experience.

She is a little girl now, no longer a baby.  She still sucks on my boobs with aplomb, but now she can grab them and put them in her mouth as I am asleep. (Assuming that she is awake enough, most of the time she just starts making crying sounds with her eyes closed, and searching for the boob by just opening her mouth, as we all know that boobs just fly above our heads and will land in our mouths if we simply ask for them.  She is too lazy to even open her mouth fully!)  She tugs on my clothes when she wants me near (always, that is) and puts out her arms when she wants to be picked up (again almost always).  My biceps are getting a daily workout, and it shows.

I did get back to my prepregnant weight, and fit into my clothes (yay! 166lb).  I still have some more weight to loose in order to look very very good.  And I will.  Life is short.  And going through infertility-childbearing successfully made me feel like I could do anything.  Even though I know that it was not really that much me, and more God's will, nature's play, and the way the die were cast, I think the part that was a bit more me was the persistence.  Surprisingly, it is the same tool used in weight loss!  I lost 30 lb as of now with persistence, and will go on to lose a further ten or twenty, depending on how I feel and look.  I am now venturing into territory in which I have not been since my earlier 20's, except for briefly after being medivac'd and NPO (nothing per mouth) for three days (that was when I got pneumomediastinum after a laparoscopy...for infertility.  Gee, this infertility does help one lose weight, doesn't it...tongue-in-cheek).