I want to remember this: Nursing

[almeda]

Sort of a choose-your-own-adventure anecdote.

Beginnings:

• She wakes with a jump and grimacing startle -- sleepy-to-yelling in no time at all. Everything is wrong. She is wet. She is hungry. Perhaps she had a bad dream, or it was Just Time, but whichever, she's indignantly upset NOW.
• or ... she fusses a bit in someone else's arms, but it isn't a diaper. I pull out a boob and her attention locks onto it, eyes big, wide, excited. Her feet kick in anticipation.
• or ... she moves in bed beside me, jostling me awake with a waving arm.
• or ... she starts chuckling to herself and kicking her feet in the bouncy chair we have safely settled in her bassinet, and I wake up and look at her. She gives me the Big Excited Eyes while smacking her lips, so I unbuckle the safety lap restraint and lift her out into my arms.
• or ... she sloppily gums my husband's neck as he walks her up and down the floor, sucking with big wet slurping noises.
• or ... I'm changing her diaper, and her face lights up with a big, happy, wide-eyed smile, and she licks her lips in anticipation: SHE knows what happens after a diaper change!

Middles:

• I fold her in my arms and offer the nipple. She scrubs her face across it a few times, then opens wide, the top of her nose crinkling with the force of her enthusiasm, before GLOMPing onto it. Her tongue and jaw work on it in a syncopated rhythm with her tiny snuffly breathing, instantly in suck-suck-suck vacuum mode, her rhythm amusingly like that of my breastpump.
• or ... she cuddles up close to the breast, mouth wide, and explores with her tongue, seeming to enjoy the proximity but in no real hurry to eat. She'll lick it and rub it with her face and grin up at me and generally have a grand old time before really getting down to it.
• or ... she fusses angrily when I try to put her on the breast, until (through trial and error through several favorites) I figure out exactly which position she wants to eat in THIS time: vertical, horizontal, slonchy-sitting, leaning forward against my chest, etc.
• or ... she eats with a quiet, inward-directed attention. It seems angelic, peaceful, zenlike. Then there's a sudden rip-roaring, bubbling SPLORT that goes on and on and on, like noises made by a 4-year-old who's just discovered fart jokes are funny, and then? Then she smiles.
• or ... she's so very happy that everything is Right With The World (diaper dry, clothes warm and cuddly, position just right, milk flowing well) that she has to stop eating to grin up at me, mouth gaping open in a brilliant "Polident Smile" -- one where you've taken your dentures out first.

Ends:

• She's in suck-suck-suck vacuum mode when she suddenly stops, takes a deeep breath through her nose, and pops off the nipple to stretch her neck and then flop her head decidedly back down onto the breast, as if it's the best pillow in the world and she approves. She is asleep, full as a tick and twice as peaceful (at least).
• or ... she eats for a while and then gets distracted, squirming her legs and scrubbing her face across the nipple: her diaper is wet and uncomfortable, and she simply (in Norma Cassaday's immortal phrase) "Cayn't Stannit!"
• or ... the magnitude of her sucks gradually tail off, her eyes shut, until it's a judgement call whether she's asleep or not. If not, she can eat like that for an hour or more. If so, I can check by gently removing the nipple from her mouth. If she's too asleep to notice, protest, and reach for it again, I can safely put myself away and just hold the sleeping baby.
• or ... there's so much going on all around that she can't help being so fascinated she repeatedly loses her grip on the nipple, rapt, sucking input down through her eyes with a different kind of hunger.
• or ... she's sleepy and keeps dozing off, but wakes with a start if I take her "teddy nipple" away. She's done eating, but still using the breast for comfort.