anticipation.

Lately, I've been having a hard time keeping up with Irie's appetite. The kid will cheerfully drink 15 ounces of breastmilk while I'm off at a single workday. Granted, she was 9 pounds, 7 ounces when she was born, and has pretty consistently been in the 99th percentile for size, so this didn't surprise me all that much.

But the pressure to keep up has been a little daunting. We blew through the freezer stores within a few weeks of my returning to work, so now we're on a day-to-day restocking mission. But what about the weekends, you ask, surely you have plenty of time to pump a little extra and store up some milk for the week ahead?

This is where I laugh merrily and pat your adorable noggin. Such a charming theory; I was once that naive too. In reality, my weekends are generally spent constantly running around with a two-and-a-half year old and an infant, doing fun stuff, doing errands, doing chores, but always doing. When I do stop to sit down, well, first of all, Hungry Baby wants to nurse all that milk she's used to getting from the bottle most weekdays, and I now have to magically produce extra to keep up the pumped supply for Monday. Secondly, I have to be ready to jump back up at a moment's notice to run after, help, or otherwise manage said two-and-a-half year old, which doesn't work all that well when I'm plugged in to a milking machine (more commonly known as a pump, but nonetheless a device that more often than not makes me feel like a dairy cow).

So. Until I figure out some wonderful plan - presumably one that doesn't involve my husband working seven days a week - my pumping time on weekends is basically limited to during big sister Ellie's naptime or after she goes to bed. And so a couple of days ago, I was doing research on when I could introduce Irie to solid foods. ("Irie, meet Avocado. Yes, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.") My doula and other respected resources indicated that we could start some easy-to-digest foods (such as avocado and very ripe banana) at four months, which is coming up right quick.

I got pretty excited about this prospect. I mean, it's extremely cool to be your child's only food source, but man, it is a lot of responsibility and stress. Even though she'll still primarily rely on breastmilk, it'll be nice to have some backup.

Later that night, I was nursing Irie. She does something her sister used to do, except Irie does it more often: she'll suddenly stop nursing and gaze up with me, big beautiful eyes framed by a small sweet face, then after a moment she'll get this wonderful grin and turn back to nursing. Nurse, gaze, nurse, gaze, nurse, gaze. I never get tired of it. There's something about her grin that's totally unique to that specific situation, for some reason; an anticipatory excitement that I never see any other time.

And it hit me, all of a sudden: starting the weaning process, for all the freedom it'll give me, brings me one step closer to not seeing that sweet, special smile anymore. For all the stressful responsibility of being her only food source, it's also an amazing, empowering feeling to be, literally, everything she needs for these first few months. Sure, other people meet her needs, but nobody else can feed her without my assistance. She needs me.

And so I find myself savoring every single nursing session now, trying to etch into my memory the way her hand lightly (or sometimes not so lightly) grips my skin, the expressions on her face, ranging from intently concentrating to so sleepy and dozing-off autopilot, and especially, that intense gaze that says, "I am yours, and you are mine."

...I might put off introducing her to solid foods for an extra week or so.