We spent Sunday night at the hospital, rooming in with Luke. He had no monitors, no tubes, nothing to distinguish him from any other baby who is 38-weeks gestational age. Yesterday morning, we brought him home.

Nice as it was to have both boys at what Doug calls the baby petting zoo (we pop in, hold them for awhile, and pop back home again while the nurses do all the hard work), I’m so glad to have Luke home. Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses. In fact, it’s a horribly gray day in Seattle. In August. Which is supposed to be our nicest month of the year. Sometimes this city is seriously lame.

Anyhoo, back to Luke: though he eats three meals a day at the breast, he has to be topped off with a bottle, and his other five or six meals are strictly from a bottle. This means the shape of my life is no longer a triangle. It’s a cone.

That’s the shape of the flange on my breast pump.

I feed Luke, then I pump. Then I wash my pump. Then I feed Luke again. Or pump. Or both.

Somewhere in there, I also manage to feed myself (food that others have prepared because who has time to cook when she has a baby or a couple of plastic flanges hanging off her breasts?), visit Ben in the hospital for some skin-to-skin time and to drop off all that milk I’ve pumped, and read to or play with my older kids.

I’m also trying to return phone calls and emails and keep up with this blog (though I fear the next few posts will be the lamest ever written), but “try” is a relative term here.

And forget writing thank you notes. I owe about 200 people a debt of gratitude no note could convey, but I’d at least like to acknowledge that… and yet I haven’t managed to write a thank you note to any of them. I’m hoping by Christmas maybe I’ll get those notes written.

In the meantime, I need to go pump again.