Learning to Cry Read Online Free Page B

tried to keep Cheryl from carrying her.
    This meant I was on baby duty from the time I came home from work and 24-hours-a-day on the weekend. My in-laws stayed with us for a few months, and her mother was wonderful around the house -- preparing meals, doing laundry, picking up, and watching the baby during the day. Her father was helpful, as well, but in other ways. He tended to need assistance as often as he dolled it out, though. I think it came from her mother spoiling him for several years. But he was a wonder with projects. Damn, he could fix things and was always running errands to get things we had to have at the time.
    My parents made the obligatory visit, but taking care of children is not really their bailiwick. They are more the working types, and family was not always the highest priority. Most people often comment upon meeting them how they are not as affectionate as the majority of families. It doesn’t matter to whom they’re being compared. I don’t come from a family of huggers, I guess. Not sure where I got my genes, but I sure did love hugging Melissa.
    I connected with her in the initial weeks and months. I got up to feed her or bring her to her mother to be bottle fed. Breastfeeding had not been an option even considered, so we were on bottle duty around the clock.
    Cheryl enjoyed feeding Melissa, but in the beginning it was difficult for her to move. Looking back on those first few weeks, it was a special time for me. I have always felt that Cheryl held substantial regret surrounding her lack of involvement. She talks about missing out in the beginning and blames that period in time on why my oldest daughter and I are so connected. That connection has led us down both a good and a bad path, I should note. I wouldn’t change anything about our time together in the beginning, but I do wonder what the first few months of a child’s entrance into the world means long term.
    I will not say that Melissa was perfect in the first few years of her life, but she was pretty damn close. I still remember walking in Wal-Mart one day as the three of us were shopping for some household products. There was a woman who had a little baby screaming at the top of her lungs in her cart. I stood watching, wondering how she could be such a bad parent. What was she doing so wrong that she couldn’t keep her baby appeased enough to stop the tantrum? Melissa never acted up in public.
    We knew friends of ours that had stopped going to restaurants when they had their first child. Their social lives seemed to abruptly cease. We, on the other hand, took Melissa with us everywhere. At the time she was born they had just come out with the newest car seat that would sit directly into a little stroller frame. You just had to unbuckle the seat from the car, drop it in the frame, and walk away. Melissa loved not having to be moved, and her seat was so comfortable. She would sit for hours at a restaurant, looking around, taking in the surroundings.
    People would constantly come over and tell us what a good baby we had. She seemed to never act up for any lengthy period. When she began crawling and walking, we had a few episodes that were relatively mild. She drew on a wall with some magic markers one day. We explained to her this was wrong and she, after the third time, finally ended up in trouble. She didn’t do it after that. She was just testing the boundaries which, again, seemed natural.
    She did have an issue with stairs, though. We had a flight of stairs in our house and a landing two steps up from the bottom. She tumbled down the stairs at least three times. We would hear this loud thumping sound as she flopped from one stair to the next, bouncing back and forth between the railing and the wall. The slow motion affect remained the same each time as both Cheryl and I would jump up, only to reach the designated landing spot as Melissa came to rest. There was always that delayed reaction as she rocked to a stopping point before she