Adventures in Baby-Raising

And now for the story that goes with the picture in the previous post:

Boy does that baby ever get a lot of attention when we go out. On the cherry blossom day, surrounded by tourists, we heard "oh what a cute baby" X a million for a couple hours. I fed her right there at the tidal basin and the minute she emerged from the cover I heard coos from all sides. Then El Esposo carried her in the Baby Bjorn for a while and felt quite the stud as all the surrounding women kept looking in his direction and smiling. Yes we were feeling mighty proud of our genetic material.

Fast forward to later that day . . .

Five minutes after little A finally falls asleep we pass a bus that is laying on the horn for the entire time it takes for the car in front of it to move--about 3 hours I think. Then it is ON. Forget normal meltdown, hello festival of screaming.

Now the baby is getting a whole new style of attention from all sides. It's getting cold to take her out so we frantically race through endless blocks and endless disapproving stares and we get to the tourist-heavy metro which is jam-packed. I keep insisting that we have to find somewhere for me to stop and nurse the overly worked-up baby. Suddenly a trillion degrees, we push through the people waiting for the next train until we find a bench, which we promptly take over. As I finally start feeding and get that baby to calm down in the middle of the hordes, I realize just how hard core I am. You can't get much more in-public than this. I would feel like a La Leche League crusader if I weren't so tired and relieved. I also downed my entire bottle of water while feeding her. Take that metro. (The little boy next to me was like "Can I have some water? She's drinking some!" His mom said, "She's the exception to the rule because she's nursing a baby." Boo ya.) So much for our smugness about Captain Adorable. She still is a baby after all.