Thoughts on my baby

Miri and Daddy are off spending this cold, rainy last Saturday of May 2015 at a Brewers game at Miller Park with Miri's BFF Adelyn and her daddy, and I'm home with my little E-man. My sweet little boy was his usual playful, happy self all morning... and as soon as Daddy and Miri left, he became cranky, wanted nothing to do with the lunch I prepared for him, and, when I went to take him out of his highchair after 50 minutes of just barely picking at his food, he was BURNING up. I knew the second I touched him that he was febrile and that it was a high one. So I gave him ibuprofen, read him stories til he calmed down (he had started crying when I took away the plate of food he had no interest in), and he fell asleep in my arms in the rocking chair as I sang him lullabies. Even though it was like holding a lump of hot lava against me, it was a very special moment to have Emmett fall asleep in my arms.

I'm so incredibly grateful for the moments when Emmett still feels like a baby to me. Maybe it's not even that he seems like a baby; it's more a feeling in those moments that being his mommy and being with him is just the most important thing in the world. That I'm needed just because I'm his mommy. I felt it today when he fell asleep in my arms, hot and feverish. I feel it when I'm changing his diaper or his clothing on the changing table, and he grabs me around my neck and pulls my face down next to his in a hug, and he holds on so tight for a full minute or two or three, and if I try to pull back (because I'm bent over in a funny position, after all), he pulls me back and won't let go. I felt it when he dove into my arms when I picked him up from daycare on Wednesday. I feel it when he says 'thank you mama' for the little, tiny, inconsequential things I do. It makes me feel so full of love for him that I could burst.

Oh Emmett. There's a line in a book I love, a book I've not yet read to you, but that I'm sure we will read together, many many times. I think of this line all the time when I think about you. From Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak:

"I'll eat you up, I love you so."

You are growing up so fast, but even when you're bigger than me, you'll always be my baby boy.