IamBMETammy's Journal: Why I am late to class in the mornings

I have two sons, this is known. One looks like my husband as a toddler even though from birth to one year he looked a startling amount like my older sister. The other looks like me.

It is a peculiarity of the offspring of my parents that between infancy and adulthood very little changes in the basic features (mine less so than my sister but I tend to think that has to do with weight). So I see this baby who looks like me as a baby, which means that he looks very much like me as an adult and it amazes me.

I nurse him laying down a lot, so we lay there in the morning, still in bed and I watch him eat. I am enthralled by him. It is a strange thing to see someone who looks so much like me, so close to me. He is still asleep in those early morning moments. If he is not finished and the breast is removed he will blindly quest for it, finding it easily by some infant intuition but all the time he's searching his sleeping face is crinkled with frustration. Re-insertion of the breast into his mouth instantly smooths his expression, he relaxes deeper into the bedding and is calm once again.

Eventually I get up and get ready for the day while he sleeps on. The last part of my routine is dressing him. I take his clothes, his dry diaper and wet wipes and crawl back on the bed. I twitch aside the blanket, my mood harried and rushed and ready to throw the baby into his clothes and go, and everything stops. I get pulled back into the slow, quiet feeling of the early morning. I watch him sleep. He is beautiful when he sleeps, although sometimes when he's fighting the knowledge that he is awake he makes odd expressions and will poke out his lower lip. He is less attractive at those times, but it has its own special charm. It is funny, watching him try to cling desperately to sleep.

So what should take 5-10 minutes takes 15, maybe more because of those minutes I spend watching. But I wouldn't trade being early to class for the memories.