I am at the dining room table, wearing a long sweater over a nightgown, not dressed or showered for the day. Annabel is in her crib, cooing softly to herself and playing with the soft toys in there; she seemed so tired that she looked practically comatose when she was out here with me, but now in there she seems to have gotten her second wind. It's ok. I know that when she is done playing, she will grab hold of her favorite blanket, plop her little body down (head on the blanket), and go to sleep. Geoff and Katie are at McDonald's Playland right now. It's Katie's spring break, but it seems too cold for the park. Also, we are not going anywhere this week, and I have pneumonia. Geoff's taken her to Playland a lot in the past several days.
I went through Annabel's clothes the other day, pulling out the ones that are too small so there will be room for the ones that used to be too big. I left a sparse few items, partly because we need to do laundry, and partly because I haven't yet found the energy to go down to the basement and pull out whatever container is full of clothes for the 9 to 12 month old. This is not the first time I've put away clothes that were too small for my baby, and although I felt a couple of small twinges of nostalgia as I folded up some of my favorite items (especially the ones that were also favorites of mine when Katie wore them), what really got to me were the receiving blankets.
They are not really keepsakes. They were not made for me, lovingly, by any individual, or made for her, lovingly, by me. They are rectangles of soft fabric, mostly white with colorful printed designs. They were designed, all of them, I think, by somebody working for Target's Circo brand, and so there must be thousands of homes across the country where these same blankets are used every day. They are not especially mine.
Except that they are. And so I actually patted them before I boxed them up. I caressed them softly with my fingertips. I took one and rubbed it to my cheek, breathing carefully to see whether I could smell any baby-ness on the soft fabric, trying to let the quiet and the smell and the soft cloth remind me of how it felt to be the mother of this particular newborn (my brand new baby who was a total mystery to me and yet was on the other hand known by me so intimately and well). I tried to decide which ones were my favorite. Was it this one, here, with the magenta butterflies? Or was it this one with the pastel polka dots? This plain green one was not my favorite, but ooh, this shell pink polka dotted one? So nice.
It's not just that my baby has gotten big, you see, it's that she's entered an entirely new stage of babyhood, one where she hardly ever lays her head down on my receiving blanket-covered shoulder to spit up. One where she is almost never quiet and still unless she is sleeping. One where she crawls and stands and rolls around to get from place to place instead of lying where you put her.
I don't know. It seems ridiculous to get sad about putting away the receiving blankets. Since when does that stop me?
