It's raining babies, part II

I just learned that my friend Paulene gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on Friday the 13th! Her husband Michael is getting ready to take his little ladies home from the hospital now, so I will try to go visit them later this week. It is so much fun to be surrounded by all these brand-new babies. My Michael and I have been doing a lot of reminiscing about when Isaac was first-born -- I will never forget it. It was so very surreal to finally see what he looked like, after cooking him in my belly for 9 months. Although I had tried to imagine how he would look, I never thought he would look like he did. He was just so big, and long, and his noggin was squid-shaped from 3 hours of pushing. And the hair! It was reddish-blond -- I never even thought about him having any. I couldn't believe that this was him, the baby that I had been carrying for so long, and that now was finally time for me to be a mom. It was all very overwhelming, and it almost didn't seem like it could be real. Then the nurses took him away to clean him up and put goop in his eyes, and they put a hat on his head and a little straightjacket-type shirt on him, and brought him back to me and laid him on my chest. I didn't even know how to hold him right -- the nurses had to show me. But I held him in my arms so that I could see his face, and to my surprise, he was LOOKING at me. I will never forget it -- the first time I hold my little guy, all he wants to do is blink really hard to try to get the goop out of the way because he needs to see what his mom looks like, just as I am looking at him, taking him all in for the first time. That's what made it real for me -- the blinking. He wasn't a doll, he wasn't an alien, he was a human baby, my very own little human baby, and he had too much goop in his eyes for his liking, but he was going to stare at me anyway. It was like he was telling me, "okay lady, you may think look pretty rough right now, but I picked you to be my mom and to me you are the most interesting-looking thing I have ever seen. Even though the only thing I have to compare you to is the color red." I better get back to work now before I get too sniffly -- babies are just so cool!