Vagabond Artist

So I am a mother and now have a family with father and baby and all the works. It is overwhelming the thoughts and also the change in hormones and OMG there is no time to do anything but tend to the little girls needs. As every mother knows the memory of that first cry will always be so crystal clear in my mind, what an emotion.

She is really cute (but as the say in Italiano ogni scarafonne è bello a su' ma'), sorry no photos. When she is older she can put her own photos on the web. She has ten fingers and ten toes.

Giving birth in a French hospital was interesting. The hospital where I went has over 6000 births a year, that is 20 a day! There is no one doctor that follows you but interns and students of every sort from the midwives to the surgeons. The nurses are professionals. I got lucky and had a really nice room with a view and direct sunlight. At night you could even see a little bit of the eiffel tower sparkling. It was nice to be totally taken care of and to know that because of socialized medicin that the whole deal was paid for by taxes, no penny from my pocket.

Coming home was better than ever. Especially that first sip of beer with alcohol that we had at the Academie de la Biere. The happy father carried her and took her to show off at the boulangerie and the boucherie and the tabac and my favorite fruit stand at the market and at the cafe.

It is truely amazing that we were all once so small and that our parents took care of us 24hours a day. I look at people on the street and think gosh they were once so small.

Its amazing how rubbery babies are. They can't control their heads that are so huge compared to everything else, they thrash about and make funny faces and noises, fixate on things that don't seem to be there.

They eat, poo, sleep do it all over again. What a life.

All of our friends have adolescent kids, they complain about their kids yet are so excited that we had a baby. Their excitement is short lived because they go back to their stories of adolecents, terrifying us. Mini skirts, boy friends, girlfriends.

To think that we were all so tiny.

Babies are really amazing creatures, who ever would have thought. I was never around kids let alone babies before now. They go on automatic, eat, sleep, poo and make lots of grimaces.

They seem so rubbery flopping around kicking and jerking their little arms. They fixate on things that we can't see but the faces they make are hilarious. Looking so serious then smiling. The true smile doesn't come until several weeks old so the smiles that I see now are related to the efforts of digestion. They are accompanied by explosive sound effects and lumpy diapers.

to sleep or not to sleep

That is the question.

Should I try to rest while the 4and1/2 week old baby rests or should I do those one and a milion things waiting on my list. Buorcratic boring things like paying taxes, documents.

Why do those things make my eyelids heavy? Maybe I'll do the laundry. I go into the bedroom to get something and get something else, where did i put my shoes?

Even going to the boulangerie for a croissant in the morning is a major outing.

Navigating the bus and metro with a baby stroller is, well lets say not easy. How am I going to go up all those stairs when I get to Florence in a few weeks.

Finally I decide to sllep and bling bling the phone rings, a telemarketer gives me their speil and then the baby wakes up....