Flashback

I'm continually baffled by the psychological/hormonal effects of pregnancy and motherhood. There are aspects that I had not been told or read about, and maybe they are specific to my chemistry... Early in my pregnancy I began having memories so strong and vivid they were like waking dreams, almost obscuring my sense of my actual surroundings. They were mainly focused around my grandparents and their homes as I experienced them as a young child. Small details such as how the carpet on a staircase felt and smelled, the temperature of the air one morning on the bluffs in the backyard, or the taste of Fruitloops came back with significant-seeming force. I guess I was either connecting to my own babyhood/childhood or with the ancestral contributors to my own little growing project. Of course, there were a zillion of more obvious and well-documented types of hormonal adventures which I experienced on the way to Sonja's current toddlerhood, but today I found myself returning to that early type of memory madness.
Over the past few days Greg and I have really been noticing that Sonja is gaining the heft and presence of a person, a child rather than baby. She just feels huge; her legs are so long, her feet can walk up your body and face til she's upside down in your arms before you know what happened! I have this overwhelming sense that I can FEEL her growing. And so throughout the day today I've been repeatedly rendered still and stupid by memories of my youth, broken into specific stages. They were categorized by the mood created by my group of friends and the music specific to that era. It was almost as if I was reliving each block of time, and I realized that there main feeling that you have as a child or a young adult that seems to go away as an adult is EXPANSIVENESS. It must be the sensation of growing! That sense of your fingers extending out, literally and metaphorically, but with the whole body, and of course the heart and mind. I think that my ablility to re-feel it right now is directly related to Sonja's delicious, heavy, healthy body in my arms.