TIWTRT

This week I want to remember our nursing relationship.  Our breastfeeding relationship is really precious to me, and I hope it will continue for some time.  I want to remember how he opens and closes his hand on my side (sometimes it hurts if I haven't cut his nails!) He loves to reach for my nose or my mouth or my eyes with his free hand and a mischievious grin.  Sometimes when he's in the middle of nursing he reaches for his feet, and I tickle them and his face lights up and he laughs with a little trickle of milk out of the corner of his mouth. He giggles if I blow raspberries on his hands or nibble his fingers. At eight months he will squeeze the side of my breast, almost like a lovey. Sometimes when he falls asleep nursing he'll relax and hang his arm over my breast like it's the arm of a couch. At night he cuddles it while he nurses. Even in his sleep, he'll reach out his soft warm little hand and stroke my breast, arm, side, or cheek just to make sure that I'm there. Sometimes he sighs softly and cuddles close to me. It's really cute how he'll make sounds in his sleep like he's nursing.

Other times he is an acrobatic, squirmy, bundle of impossibility. Is it loud? Bright? People talking?  He'll kick and squirm and continuously pull away and latch back on, pull away and latch back on. Usually I either take him somewhere quiet if he's really hungry or put him down to play if he doesn't seem really hungry.  His new thing, now that he has seven teeth, is to finish nursing and then try to knaw on me. And if I tell him, "no", he grins up at me like, "What, Mama? I wasn't going to bite you!"

Nursing is how we connect when we're busy, or when I've been gone all day. He invariably wants nurnies as soon as I get home from work, even if he's just eaten. He stares into my eyes and we re-connect and I make silly faces at him and he stops to give me a smile.  It's how he's comforted when his tummy hurts, when he gets a boo-boo, when he can't sleep, when he's overstimulated and played-out, when he just needs some relaxation or lovey time from his Mama. He looks at me and  in his beautiful green gold eyes I see all the thanks and love in in the world.

I am SO grateful that we have had a good, and fairly easy nursing experience. I feel so intimately connected and bonded with my little love and I dont' know if that connection would have been as instant without our nursing relationship. I feel that it has give me a lot of confidence as a mother and as a woman. I wouldn't trade it for the world!