I am in love!!! Her name is Josie and she is a one month old baby. She is the most precious thing i have ever seen. She makes the world's sweetest little gurgling sounds. I got to hold her for hours. Something about the smell of infants. My uterus is going nuts. I feel so sorry for my dear husband, who is getting all kinds of new pressure from me. I want to have a baby. There is no other way to express this. I am ready. I am at the perfect age (27). I am at the perfect place in my life. I am married. I am financially secure. I am done with school. I am in a job that would accomodate me as a new mom (summers off, onsite daycare where I could come in and play with the baby during my breaks) flexible hours. An empty yellow bedroom in my home, which I own.

I truely thought this trip would serve as a form of birth control. I told him, watch. We are seeing her at an age where she is still larva. They don't smile yet (she had to smile for the first time WHEN I WAS THERE) They do nothing but cry (only when being bathed or changed) and they sleep most of the day (but make the cutest faces in their sleep).

Also, and this is the best part, my friend told me that whenever I have a baby, she will come out here for the first couple weeks and show me the ropes. Some background here. When I was born, my grandmother did this for my mother. My mom had always talked about when she would come and do this for me. Especially after I got married, it was a frequent topic of conversation. My mom died when I was 24, and since then I cannot even think about this subject without getting really upset. In fact the one thing making me still hesitate about having children is that when I realize that they will never know her, I cannot stop crying. I'm doing it now. That was going to be the most important moment in both of our lives, and now I am alone. I generally don't feel like she's watching me. It terrifies me that my kids won't have a sense of the amazing person that she was. I can tell stories until I'm blue in the face, but they still won't know. They won't see that mischevious gleam in her eye when I would come home from dates and she would say "your shirt's inside out. Oooh. You looked! That must mean it wasn't on all night". I have very few home movies with her in it, and none where she is being goofy. I have an old old movie from her trip to disneyland when she was a little girl. She wasn't anything like the person she grew into. In the video, she seems very shy and unsure of herself. Very different than the vibrant, confident (at least on the outside) woman that I knew for most of my life. True, she grew into most of this after the divorce, but she still had come a long way before hand.

Anyhow, I digressed. It meant so much to me when Jackie offered to come and do that. It was the first time in 3 years and two months that I didn't get that cold, lonely feeling when I thought about it.