They're Alright!

So I went to my very first La Leche League meeting last night. Incidentally, it was the very first meeting ever in our area (which would explain why when I tried finding a local meeting online a month ago, the closest group was three hours away). There were four of us that showed up. I'm the rookie, the other three actually hang out all the time and they all have kids. Two of the women gave birth only 7 weeks ago. We talked about the benefits to Mom & Child from breastfeeding, which I had heard the majority of before, but it was good still to hear the discussion and opinions of these other moms. The meetings are once every month and the best part? These mom are really cool! I LIKED them. There is definite Friend-Potential (tm) here and I am excited! So there are several reasons why I will go back:
1) Combined, these three women have roughly 15 years of experience between them (the group leader, who just finally had a girl, also already has FOUR boys!), so there should be no shortage of advice to draw from.
2) I like them and I think they liked me too. They kept saying things like "you aren't seriously due in June?!" and "you are SO tiny!" With compliments like that, how can I NOT go back? (Maybe I should be taking some pictures so I can look back on how 'tiny' I was during pregnancy....) Also, two of them get together every week to scrapbook and after meeting me once, they already invited me over tonight. (Except tonight is the 5th installment of Childbirth Ed. so that's where we'll be. *sigh*)
3) They fed me. Chocolate chip pumpkin bread and zucchini bread. Yum!
4) They are funny. <- I can tell that because we laughed a lot.

There's a little bit of rigidity in their view of breastfeeding as far as I'm concerned, but I think I can handle it. I understand that some women don't want to still be breastfeeding when their children are old enough to talk. I also understand that some women can't breastfeed for one reason or another and I refuse to look down on those people because the decision to breastfeed in the first place is personal. We already have a good idea of what we want to do and what goals we want to set for ourselves and I don't see myself being negatively influenced by these women because I'm just stubborn like that. So that's your update on that.

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This morning I woke up at 5:15 when Husband's alarm went off (for the first time anyway). I could hear the neighbour down the street revving the engine of his truck a billion times before he leaves for work. For a fleeting moment, I felt like I would get up and look out the window and there I would see the view that greeted me outside my bedroom window everyday from birth until I went away to college. As I so often have throughout this pregnancy and since we moved here, I laid there craving that familiarity. I can close my eyes and see all the houses on My Street. I can see them as they were when I was three (let's face it, I can barely remember that far back sometimes, nevermind to infancy), then five, then 10, and so on. I can see all the cosmetic transformations of each; when the house across the street got a repainted fence (it's always been the same colour), when the house in the corner had the pool filled in after more than two decades of pool parties and laughing, screaming, wet children, and when my friend LeeAnn's Dad finally finished building her Cabbage Patch Playhouse, subsequently the Ultimate Archie Comic Lending Library. I can remember when the tree in front of that playhouse was only six feet tall. I can remember when the evergreen tree on our own front lawn was planted.

Now when I go home, I see how all the trees have grown. I am constantly amazed at how tall they've become. Where they used to be too short to give any comfort from the hot summer sun, they now stand towering over the backyard, shading backyard barbeques and blocking out noise from the park behind our house.

My relatives celebrated Easter at my parent's house this year. My cousin had her little boy there and he got to go out to the park to play. When we talked, we remembered how we used to go out there to play when we were little and they would come to visit. The toys in that park haven't changed since my infancy. Oh, they've gotten new paint and new dumps of sand around their bases, but the structures are still the same. The same slide that we played on and dumped rocks down (and fell off of), is still making kids squeal even now. There's still a summer program every July at the paddling pool and they still use the baseball diamond for little league games. When I walk through the park in the summer, I can still see remnants of forts we built in those trees when I was eight; or maybe they're just remnants from last summer and a new crop of eight year-olds. And thinking about all this makes me long for a place where we can be content and planted. A house our kids can grow up in. The sense of security that comes from watching a neighbourhood grow and evolve.

We don't have that here, but maybe some day.