milk-skin.

writing from a loved and lovely moment just after walking baby into dreams, belly full of sugar plums, smelling of lavender and earth. we've just come in from the farmers market, our most loved weekend ritual. sunday mornings, after coffee's been sipped, we slather on sunscreen and tug on shoes, and set off with our market basket jingling with the week's emptied milk bottles.

it's been a week of sickly spells shared by mum and bub, and tended ever so gently by papa. fever brewed first within me, then baby, and i notice now from the vista of mending that i feel a bit more seasoned as a mother than before, now that i have tended a poorly babe through hours that i have myself ached for tending. there are circadian nursings and hourly movements that whisper of motherhood made manifest, and then there is a fever-dreaming baby shipwrecked on the island of my own stormy chest, my mother-heart rising to meet every wave of want and need, dipping without thought or hesitation into reserves of energy and spirit i didn't know i had. my mother-name feels weathered, earned. i hear "mama" float forth on a rosebud voice and think: there are so many ways to say "love."

and how brave our little ones are, in all that they do, in all that they are. it cannot be easy to be so small, so few of words, so big of feeling, so new here, still, so heaven-near that i swear i can smell stars on his golden crown.

these hours remind me so much of the beginning. all skin and milk.