Baby Blanket Blues... and Pinks

With apologies to poet William Carlos Williams and to high school English students everywhere who can do a much better job at this literary exercise:

so much depends
upon

a white flannel
blanket

with blue and pink
stripes

swaddling millions of newborn
babies.

When an NPR item popped up in my Facebook newsfeed asking for followers to submit photos of their newborn babies wrapped in the ubiquitous flannel receiving blanket used by hospitals everywhere, I immediately went searching back through my iPhoto stockpile to see what I could find.

I didn’t end up submitting photos of either of my children for what ultimately would be NPR’s story, “Born In The USA? This Blanket Might Look Familiar.”   Instead, the search inspired a brief weep-fest about how big my former babies are.

Mind you, they aren’t actually all that big in the grand scheme of things. Lucy is pushing 4 and Isaac just turned 1 in May. But something about looking back at a photo taken of Lucy minutes after she was born, all swaddled in one of those white blankets with the blue and pink stripes and wearing a tiny knit cap made me start bawling.

I used to be able to wrap her up in a baby burrito in one of the many striped blankets we brought home with us from the hospital (sorry about the petty thievery, GBMC, but gosh I love those blankets). Now she’s a whirling dervish of a girl who is hard to slow down let alone swaddle.

The same goes for her baby brother, who seems to be everywhere at once these days, making a mess of the house and looking for trouble. It’s hard to believe that a year ago, I was nearing the end of my 12-week maternity leave, the best summer of my life. And now life is a bit more complicated, with a full-time job and two small children and obligations popping up like the dandelions in my yard.

So for me, looking back at those old babe-in-blanket photos stirred memories of being on the cusp of a new era, first as a new mom without a clue, and then as a more relaxed mom of two. It all happened so fast that now I’m not sure how we got here. But I’m so glad we’ve made it and can count those blanket memories as the start of something great.