July 30
4:00pm
I will never forget our first meeting. You were wide awake, your eyes focused and drinking in everything possible and tightly swaddled in a yellow receiving blanket. I can still feel how I was shaking (the cool, the calm, the never let her drawers get in a twist…aaaahhh but I had never encountered holding my first born before, had I?) You had a lot to teach me, over the coming years, some slid down like a cool drink for a parched throat, other knowledge I am ashamed to say, I choked and spit out, but I learned.
I loosened the blanket to get a closer look. Your fine hair was Dutch blond, shaved on the top of your head but long in the back and on both sides, your all knowing big pansy blue eyes were fringed with long black eye lashes and perfectly arched blond eyebrows, a nose even our Pretty Little Dutch Girl was proud of. (She lived in fear our baby would have my patrician nose – one day when I was crowing about how cute you looked on the ultrasound, she asked if I had seen the shape of your nose – she herself had a nose cosmetic surgeons struggle to create on their patients and wanted nothing less for you, Wonder Boy).
Your rosebud mouth, with textbook shaped lips, pursed dramatically on occasion, making me believe you understood every nuance played out. You had tiny hands with unmistakably long, musician fingers and long legs and tiny feet shaped just like your Dad’s. You latched on to my breast with ease, as though you had been practicing this routine from eternity. Your tiny fingers massaged my lower arm as you gazed in to my eyes, like a wise little old man, as if to say, “Well, finally, we meet”.
Now it is only normal that every Mom thinks their baby is beautiful, but I also thought you were special. My Sister The Queen’s son excitedly exclaimed that Wonder Baby looked just like ET, which I knew was the biggest compliment he could give me – then again, my brother–in-law looked at all the babies in the General Nursery, then went to the Special Nursery and looked closely at you, Wonder Boy. He did not rave that you were the most beautiful, no, he said “The good news is, because of the C Section, his head is well shaped. Those other babies, most of them look like someone took a sledge hammer to their head” – a compliment of sorts, that you and I had no control over, but hey, we’ll run with it.