last year, maybe the year before, i bought a wire-bound notebook: dusty pink, with a faint houndstooth-checkered pattern running through it, like the material of a suit a granny might wear. in the top right corner, under a magenta foil-stamped row of six olde worlde milke bottles, is the slogan, “dairymen are the cream of the crop!”. in the bottom left corner, under a tiny silhouette still life of a pitcher, a milk glass, milk carton and a wheel of cheese with a wedge cut out of it, is the poem…

“Love is like more than an emotion, / it’s the substance of our being / Each morning as I awaken your (sic) the reason / I smilke, Your (sic) the reason I love / A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you whe you have forgotten the words.”

[edit: what i meant to type was “your the reason i smile”. evidently the milk, which is all i think about (and smell of) these days, is more pervasive than i realised.]

i thought that this notebook, after languishing a year, maybe two, in my amusing notebook box, would be a most appropriate logbook for my breastfeeding diary (date, time, duration, side).

yesterday at 3.45 in the afternoon, maeve drank for twenty-eight minutes, eight minutes on the left and twenty on the right. then she had a vomit, which although moderate in volume, was nowhere near the torrent of the day before, which came up in four great gushes and took even the child by surprise, judging by the look on her face. this time she seemed unfazed so we loaded her into the stroller and walked into chinatown.

we caught the lift up to happy chef, and ordered bowls of soupy noodles (me: wonton and mushroom with rice noodles; the boy: spicy beef and wonton with egg noodles), and then after, we stopped by the bubble tea place and got bubble teas to go (me: jasmin milk tea with pearls; the boy: taiwanese style lychee milkshake). we walked home the long way, and then split up at the last set of traffic lights, the boy to get some DVDs, me, maeve and the stroller to get another bumper packet of nappies. maeve was still asleep when we got home. we felt like very normal people.

there have been eight feeds since, all varying in length, but generally a punctual two hours apart. in the notebook, on the top right corner of each page, next to the six olde worlde milke bottles, “You look brilliant like morning sunshine”.