Nursing

Biajee hasn't downloaded any baby pictures from the camera, but I received a nursing picture from my friend Judy. She came to visit me in the hospital while two nurses were trying to help me breast feeding.

"See how insulted I was?" I tried to joke with her. "It's like being raped and every day two different nurses will come in to watch me feed."

Judy left quickly - she must have thought this scene was pathetic.

We finally got Arthur latched on correctly and perfectly after a whole week's effort. His weight dropped to 7 lbs 13 oz when we were discharged from hospital and even lower to 7 lbs 11 oz last Friday. But on Monday, it came back to 8 lbs again. All the sleep deprivation over the weekend was definitely worth it.

In the old days, before kids, my mind would be filled with fantasies and ambitious thoughts and terrible worry about every aspect in my life, including economic recession, global starvation and the environment and nuclear power and weapons, and now all that still goes on, but there are a lot of times in a very real sense when images of Arnold and Arthur give my mind something friendly to play with, something lovely for a change to click between its fingers.

Arthur had a little bit of Jaundice as well, but not so bad as Arnold's when he was born. He looks more red than yellow, just like a Pizza Face. He bites a lot but does not drool too much. Arnold's drool is immense. There are still rivers of drool from Arnold all day, almost biblical, like the waters of Babylon.

Arthur was able to hold his neck up the minute he was born and he looks exactly like Arnold as a baby. Biajee sometimes mistakes him for Arnold. He always has this feeling that the baby Arnold has come back. Arthur and Arnold are our anchors. Without them as the counterbalance to the current credit crunch, we would float off into outer space on fear. It crossed my mind recently that maybe we were using the kids like a drug, to avoid terrible feelings we are having about me having been laid off. But drugs take you away from what's in front of you, whereas Arthur and Arnold are what's in front of us. They're not the drug, they're the reality.

Biajee finally got his last deep cleaning part done on his teeth. In the mean time, I've made a watery mess in the bathroom and he had to repaint the drawer. No time for him to paint the dining room or kitchen. What was he thinking at that time? Doesn't he understand a baby is a handful of work? At least he wasn't complaining when Arthur peed on him from time to time.