Mama Musings

I'm off this week from my "second" job as a psychologist in solo private practice two evenings a week, which means that for a precious few days I have the luxury of being able to direct all my focus on caring for Julia, without also having to worry about returning client phone messages, fielding emergency calls and doctor consults, finding time during the day to shower and groom myself to an acceptable degree before I have to rush out the door when Christopher comes home to take over babycare, etc. While I am the first to argue that being home full-time with a baby (and doing a good job of it) is much harder than working outside the home---the fact alone that office workers generally get coffee breaks, adult companionship, lunch breaks that don't include also feeding someone else, and the freedom to use the toilet BY THEMSELVES pretty much says it all, in my view---being freed from the part-time job I do on top of chasing after Julia all day long feels like a dream. Not to mention how great it is, this week, to have a break from being gone until 10 p.m. those two evenings. Being pregnant, that schedule has felt pretty killer the last few months.

Anyway, being off this week has made me think about how little time I have left with Julia, alone. It is less than five months until baby #2 arrives. When I close my practice at the end of June, there will only be two months (hopefully!) when my attention can be focused on Julia alone. Not Julia and my work, nor Julia and the new baby. Just Julia. It's so bittersweet to really think about that, and let it sink in. It feels like she was just born, and at the same time it feels like in about another five seconds she'll be toddling off to kindergarten! Yikes.

She's such a big girl already, and suddenly. Her hair is past her shoulders in the back (alas, she still has the total baby-mullet she's had since she was a newbie) and she's getting her first haircut in a few days. She says "Please, Daddy" when she wants more supper, and sometimes even unprompted. She practices sitting on her potty chair and emphatically states, "Wash hands!" when she gets up (even though she's fully clothed and hasn't done anything). She can say "A, B, C, D" and count to ten, if you count "1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10" as counting to ten (which we do). She can say "watermelon" and "brontosaurus" and identifies correctly three kinds of birds that come to our feeder. When I tell her she's a big girl, half the time she seems pleased and half the time she says, "Baby Julia!" This morning she then added, "Mama's!" just for good measure. I told her, "Yes, honey, you'll always be my baby!" and could not believe it when I realized that it was only a year ago that she had just begun to crawl.

Truly, I am turning into one of those balls of sentimentality all mothers seem to turn into once they've become, well....mothers. Any of you not parents yet, everything you've heard is true. It really does go by in the blink of an eye, even when in the beginning you have the hardest, non-napping, constant-nursing baby in the entire universe and you don't sleep more than an hour at a stretch for seven months straight and you truly think you're going to die because of it. It still goes by in the blink of an eye. I'll have to remind myself of that in about five months, when nights now spent sleeping turn into nights spent nursing once again. Right?

Now I'd better stop emoting before Christopher makes me get my OWN "mommy-blog."