I never had these kind of mental obsessions with my other kids. As I’ve been thinking about all this, it’s weird how certain memories come back. A recurring memory I’ve had regarding my first time being pregnant was when I was working at an assisted living facility in Seward, Nebraska. One time I ended up needing to stay over night for a shift. I didn’t have to work, I only needed to be in the building.

I slept on the floor in the conference room next to the front desk area but without any sleeping stuff. I laid there in the dark thinking I couldn’t believe I was treating my child like this. I had recently found out I was pregnant. From the moment I knew there was a shift in my mind. I remember standing at the dishwasher thinking about this person who was now a part of my life. I thought about him constantly.

There’s a tiny piece of paper my mom and I started when she was down in the few days after we were home from the hospital. Neither one of us had much experience with breastfeeding and were up in the middle of the night trying to figure it out. For approximately 48 hours I wrote down which side he nursed on and how long. L-20 min. R-15 min. L-20 min. And so on. You almost never fed with both sides.

At least not at first because there was too much milk there. He would choke on it at times when it came down fast, spraying him in the face, disrupting our latch, and causing us to have to start the latching on process all over again. Important parts were hard as rocks, sore and huge. How you were supposed to get your anatomy soft enough to form anything resembling a baby bottle was beyond me.

And they were supposed to get the hind milk, because if they didn’t, then they would only get the overly sugary milk and not gain enough weight. “How do you know if he’s getting enough?”, my mom would ask sometimes. I had no idea. You just check if he’s peeing. They say if he’s having 10-12 wet diapers a day then that’s good. He’s going to have to learn how to feed himself there but I’m hoping again we will figure it out.