peace

I'm sick. Blech. Don't like it much. Messes with my body and my head. I'm reading the post I put up a few days ago and think maybe I was temporarily possessed by rabid aliens, or there's a secret ingredient in my DayQuil no one told me about. As it turned out, both sets of parents were wonderful (and not at all petulant) about making sure Jason and I could attend all festivities with all involved family members - Mom & Gary on Thursday, Dad the Tuesday before. And I'm not so neurotic about what the heck I'm going to eat. It's just turkey, for chrissake.

The real joy yesterday was that I got to wash babies. I work as a nurse tech on a mother/baby (aka postpartum) floor, and I wasn't looking forward to a 12-hour shift when all I really wanted to do was to go home, rest, and go through a couple hundred boxes of Kleenex. The Powers That Be assigned me to the nursery - normally, I am spending most of my time with the moms on the rest of the floor, not the cute chubbums, so I don't get to "play with babies" all day, as many people think I do when I tell them where I work. But being assigned to the nursery (for the first time) was a bit intimidating at first: I had never given a newborn a bath, and that's a lot of what you do in the nursery. Plus, my first baby to bathe had an excited "tag-along" daddy who had to videotape every moment of his daughter's first bath... augh. Pressure, anyone? But it was fantastic: you get them all soapy with baby shampoo, and then they're basically lying on this soft mat while you wring warm water from a washcloth to rinse them off. You put them on their tummies to get their backs, get all the cheese off of them (babies are born covered with "vernix", which is a protective layer that resembles cottage cheese), dry them off, wrap them burrito-style in a soft blanket, and stick 'em under a radiant warmer to bring their temperature back up. I have to admit, putting this little pink miracle under a radiant warmer and then giving her a lotion rub-down made me feel like I was basting the poor child, only she gurgled and cooed and farted in delight for me. There really is no possible way to be in a bad mood after going through that whole bathing process.