Hooray for babies!

I am SO happy. One of my very best friends finally had her baby. I can remember back when Jim and I weren't sure if we wanted to have kids. One of my bosses who I'd known for ages (all of us quite drunken at a bar in Houston after the company Christmas party) was feeding me the line about how you can't know how wonderful it is to have kids until you actually have them. Well, it's true. I try to not spout that opinion myself because I know people who don't necessarily want to have children, and I know Jim and I would have had a very different, but happy, life without our urchins. But we had no idea how wonderful things would be or how much we would love those little guys until we had them. And now Kim and her husband will be able to discover that same thing, which I think is wonderful.

Also, I'm finally reading a book loaned to me by my good friend Christi. It's called "Operating Instructions" by Anne Lamott. It's based on the journal she kept during the first year of her son's life. It is absolutely wonderful. She has some great observations (any woman who has birthed a boy I KNOW has had some of the same penis thoughts - hey, we don't have them so we are a little freaked out by them; plus her comments on the yucky umbilical cord stub are dead on). She also is just an eloquent writer and has some great thoughts that make me smile:

"They took us all to my room, Sam and Pammy and Steve and me, and I nursed the baby for the first time. None of us could take our eyes off him. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was like moonlight."

"His hands are like little stars."

And I loved this line, talking about how a friend of hers described how insane it is having a newborn baby around: "He said that even with a mate, it's like having a clock radio in your room that goes off erratically every few hours, always tuned to heavy metal music."

I'm off to Half Price Books next week to find a copy for myself.