Our Nights are Numbered

With my quickly expanding tummy I am finding it more and more difficult to comfortable hold Ben. It is not as obvious to anyone but me that he needs to be shifted a little further back on my hip and I am continually maneuvering him down off my stomach onto my legs when he sits on my lap. Ben enjoys being held, he prefers to be carried and he is officially still one year old and so I will appease this desire as long as I am able to hoist up his sturdy thirty pound build.

With the addition of our new bedroom this week I am thinking of how to furnish and decorate it. I would imagine that Ben's rocking chair will be transferred there. This rocking chair that forged our bond in midnight rocking. This chair that measured his growth as he went from the crook of my arm to his legs dangling to my knees. This chair with a creek if you don't rock just so and a comfortable moan as I let my dead tired weight fall into it. The chair I chanted rhymes, sang songs, quietly hummed when I couldn't remember the words and read five million stories in. In passing this chair down the hall it is more then a transition of furniture, it is a transition of time and place. Ben will give this chair to our new baby and with it all the rights and privileges that accompany the passage of infancy. Ben no longer needs rocked, he doesn't wake during the night and would prefer the empty floor space for playing.

When I look in on Ben at night before we go to bed, I touch his chest (just to make sure...) and stroke his forehead. I picture the screaming little face of his infancy red with rage and frustration at being so small and awakened with insult at an empty tiny tummy. I pick up his long relaxed body, cradle his head against my chest and feel his body weight soak against me. He stirs and falls deeper into sleep. He is most comfortable in my arms, I want to hold him as long as I can before I cannot. Before our new baby grows into my lap and nudges Ben gently into childhood.

I rock him slowly back and forth back and forth and know just what another Mother felt when she sang;

I love you forever
I like you for always
as long as I'm living
my baby you'll be.