Stay the course

Here's a fact that strikes me as rather amazing: in 113 days of life, Cleo has eaten nothing - with the exception of several bottles of formula on day 3, and perhaps a fragment of a leaf that she managed to snag while on a walk - but mother's milk. 16 weeks, folks, and nothing but milk. Add it up, at about 20 oz. per day, and you get roughly 2200 oz. of the stuff - or, to put it differently, L's already produced roughly 34 gallons of milk. That should make you blink.

And yet, it's hardly unusual. The WHO, after all, recommends that infants consume nothing but milk for a full six months. But that's actually a pretty conservative estimate, if you trust some estimates; according to one source, children in many countries are nursed until they are a full four years old, on average. I don't even want to put that in gallons.

Does the process or moving all that milk into Cleo's belly get boring, for parent or child? I think I can say that it doesn't, from the parent's point of view. L. still talks of the power of breastfeeding, and although when I'm on duty I have to use a plastic bottle, it's still a pretty cool experience. In recent days, it's gotten harder, as Cleo enjoys pushing suddenly on the bottle as though she were bench pressing - only to cry when the bottle's suddenly on the floor. But there have also been a few cases in which she's actually managed to hold the bottle herself, for a few seconds - and the much more frequent moments where we simply look at each other are, simply, quite powerful from my point of view.

And from Cleo's point of view? Well, who knows? But the act of nursing never seems to grow repetitive for her. She generally approaches each meal with vigor, with a breathy excitement, instead of with that dreary sense of duty with which so many Americans tuck into their meals. She still gets hungry, during the day, every couple of hours, but she also usually naps between meals, and so the day breaks down into a series of rather diverse units: wake; nurse; play; look; yawn; sleep. This won't hold for ever, of course; eventually, Forrest Gump simply grew tired of running, and eventually Sakyamuni descended from the mountain. There's more, ultimately, than merely milk. But isn't it grand while milk still suffices?