Very Early Days

Excerpts from a letter my mom Cill wrote to me on my 21st birthday

"I remember very clearly the first time we saw you. It was December 21st, 1956 and you were five days old. A nurse carried you in. You held up your head and looked all around. Clearly you were a bright and alert baby! I went home and made you a beautiful pink quilted baby basket to sleep in. We bought you clothes, including pink and white Mickey Mouse diapers, and eagerly awaited your homecoming."

"I have often thought about how much easier your early childhood would have been if we could have taken you home right then. But the state laws were such that we could not take you into Massachusetts (my parents' home state) until you were a month old. During that month you caught infantile diarrhea and were sick enough to be hospitalized. When we finally came to get you, you were terribly thin, eating poorly, and had one side of your head shaved where you had been fed intravenously."

"You can try a bottle at 6:00 pm they said sadly. By 6:00 pm you had downed two bottles of milk and a bottle of water and Grandma was saying "This baby is starving!" But you had visibly relaxed the moment we had you in the basket in the car. you looked straight at me and said clearly, "It's about time!" You gained three ounces in the three days before we got you to the pediatrician, which was more than you had gained in five weeks in the Home."

"Slender and wiry, the pediatrician said....a kind way of saying that you were skin and bones! That didn't last long...you ate and ate and ate. You rarely slept. Dad and I were exhausted. One of us would hold the end of a string attached to your carriage handle and gently rocked the carriage as we lay in bed, fairly hoping for some sleep. Sometimes we tied the string to Dad's toe. You were quiet if we rocked you, and you yelled if we dropped off to sleep. About 6:00 am you would finally sleep, and Dad had to get up at 6:30!"