the twinkle in my eye

to answer jen’s question – which is not at all too personal – we plan to stop at one.

we have both always wanted just one kid. it has never been a big topic of discussion as we both feel clear on it. as much as we love the twinkle and everything that she is, nothing in our experience since having her has really made us want to change the plan.

yesterday we met a one-week-old baby at the wedding. when i saw him i assumed he was premmie because he was so tiny. i asked his mum (who looked great - all dressed up and out at a wedding a week after a caesar!) how big he was and he was over 8 pounds, which is bigger than the twinkle was at birth. but he was so tiny! special k and i are totally freaked out by this – neither of us can remember the twinkle ever being smaller than this tiny slug of a baby, but she was. laydeez always exclaim, “oh, you forget how small they are!” when they hold newborns, and now i understand why they say this. you also hear people to say that you forget the pain of childbirth, and to some extent that’s true. i remember it intellectually, but i don’t remember in my body exactly how the pain felt, even though i know it was bad. i’ve heard that this is an evolutionary mechanism to ensure that we keep reproducing.

we talked about it this morning – still reeling from the smallness of yesterday’s baby. we realised that having a second baby wouldn’t be as much like being hit over the head with a saucepan because you’d know how to handle the creature, you’d know that the hard parts aren’t going to last forever, you wouldn’t be going through the identity crisis of going from somebody’s child to somebody’s mother.

this doesn’t mean that we’re planning another baby. the conception process was a whole other trauma that we’re not keen to repeat. but it’s been interesting to reflect on it all.