Nostalgic Parenting

Tonight I was putting the youngest to bed and got a blast from the past. She likes to curl up with a bottle (I know, she's too old for a bottle, no lectures, please), have some warm milk, then snuggle up on your shoulder before hunkering down in her bed.

Tonight she was having her bottle, snuggled in her little pink blankie and I started doing something that my mom used to do to my sister and I when we were kids -- I began clicking my fingernails against each other on her head. It sounds very strange, but I remember it being very soothing when I was a child.

I've done it to Marissa, Lindsey and my friends' babies with alternating responses -- some are soothed and their eyes practically start to shut, others are distracted by it, start looking around and don't like it at all.

Marissa finds it soothing. I did this to her for a while, then I stopped. She promptly picked up my hand and put it back on her head again, signaling that she wanted me to continue! She did that twice, picking up my hand and putting it back on her head, all without saying a word since she was busy with her bottle. It brought me back to those days of having my mom do this same thing on my head during church -- I suppose it was the one way she could keep us quiet for an entire hour.

On an unrelated note, I was in an internal meeting today with some co-workers and one of my friends asked me, "Have your feet always been that vein-y?" (I was wearing a skirt and heels -- no pantyhose, of course!) And by the way, this was a close friend, so it wasn't unusual at all that she would ask me that, as varicose veins bulged out of her own legs as she waddles around in her 9th month of pregnancy.

I said yes, my feet and hands have always been "vein-y," and then told her how I remember "playing" with the veins in my mom's hands during church. I used to push one over the top of the bones in her hand, only to watch it slide back over to the other side...eventually. She started re-counting how she used to pull on her grandmother's skin on her arm during church, just because it took so much longer to go back to its normal place than her mom's did!

How funny, all these little pieces of nostalgia attached to memories of these things we did to comfort ourselves...all at the expense of our patient, understanding parents.