The end of babyhood...

I finally gave up the last little teeny tiny part of me that thought that MAYBE someday I might have another child. I sold my glider (rocking chair) on craigslist tonight.

I had no problems getting rid of Rugrat's crib, his changing table, his stroller (well, actually, that filthy thing is still in the garage because I couldn't even GIVE it away). Baby clothes? Gone, for the most part - I kept a few things for sentimental reasons, but handed down the rest of his barely-worn, gorgeous baby clothes. I was the first one to have a baby in my group - everyone else came after. And almost all of those babies were boys, so my hand-me-downs were always in demand among the sisters-in-law and friends. Baby toys were disposed of too, given to cousins or donated to charities.

But I held on to the glider. I had such lovely memories of holding my little infant Rugrat, nursing him, rocking him, singing to him. Sitting upright, rocking in the middle of the night, asleep - both of us. It's amazing that you can actually continue to rock the chair and be sound asleep at the same time, but I'm sure I'm not the only mother who's done it. When he got a wee bit older, we'd snuggle up in the chair to read bedtime stories.

Time marched on, and Rugrat got too big for us to share the chair anymore (without my legs falling asleep, that is). So the chair sat, unused, in his room until we moved two years ago. Then the chair migrated to MY room. I had some fleeting idea about it being a "reading chair" because it's so comfortable. But when I read in my bedroom, I read in bed. And the chair ended up just holding stacks of clean clothes.

Why did I keep the chair for so long? I kept thinking that someday I might meet someone and get married. And someday we might decide that it would be totally cool to have a baby together. And if that happened - if I somehow changed my mind and thought, "OK, it would be fine to have another baby. I could totally live through another twelve months of being a braindead zombie. I could totally put up with a few more years of diapers and tantrums and whining and picky eating and the nonstop physical and emotional drain," if I REALLY TRULY believed that...then I'd want to have a glider. So I held on to it for way longer than I should have.

And now it's gone. That last little bit of Rugrat's infancy. That last little link to breastfeeding, which was totally the best (and worst) part of the first six months of his life. So I'm a little sad. But still, it's good to move on.