Unconditional Love

When Abby was in the hospital and for the first week or so that we had her home she slept pretty well. She slept well until she started eating well enough that she had enough energy to not sleep constantly. And then things got harder. She was colicky. She could sometimes be soothed enough by being held that she would stop screaming, but not always. I ended up holding her nearly 100% of the time. If she finally fell asleep and I went to lay her down, as soon as she was an inch or two from my body she would immediately wake up screaming. And she has THE LOUDEST VOICE of any child I have ever heard, and it is very high pitched when she's screaming! (Her voice is so loud that one time when we were at her pediatrician's and he was checking her tummy she screamed out - he looked at me with complete shock, and said "Wow, that was really loud." I said I knew it, and that was not even as loud as she could get. He said "You should keep ear plugs all around your house." I told him we did smile emoticon ). 
I struggled at first with the fact that since I held her ALL THE TIME I was getting nothing else done. But then I thought about the fact that there would come a time when she wouldn't want me to hold her any more, that I had waited A LONG TIME to have a baby to hold, so I should just enjoy it. And so I did, I stopped worrying about my lack of accomplishment and enjoyed my daughter. I can't say I enjoyed every second of it - she still screamed, she was difficult all night (we tried 4 or 5 different sleeping situations to get her to sleep at night but they weren't terribly effective), and I got tired. But over all I enjoyed her, and eventually we figured out she had dairy issues. Once we changed her diet things improved significantly. 
(As an aside, this was really hard on me. Not because she had problems with dairy but because I tried for a couple months to induce lactation so I could nurse her. I wanted to so badly. It was physically and emotionally very painful when I was trying, and emotionally painful to admit it wasn't going to work. My amazingly awesome sister had pumped for 9 months before Abby was born and saved all the milk for me - I didn't know about it until we found out about Abby! Anyway, I wanted Abby to get breast milk as much as possible so once my sister's milk ran out I started finding other milk donors. That was hard and time consuming as it was, and we still had to supplement with formula. But when we learned we couldn't do dairy any more and figured out she had problems with both the casein and lactose it didn't leave a lot of options. There are completely non-diary formulas made of soy, but she didn't handle those well. There is a non soy, non-dairy one that's super expensive that she handled well but reading the ingredient list found it was mostly sugar and oil which didn't sound to healthy to me. Or I could find milk donors who ate dairy free. I found as many donors as possible (love those women!!!!!!) and then supplemented with formula. But it was so frustrating to not be able to nurse. I would have given up dairy, sugar, whatever if I could have nursed her. I wanted to so badly. But I couldn't, and that was hard.)
But even when she was at her hardest I still loved her, I was still so grateful to have her in my life, I still felt so blessed.
I think babies are pretty easy to love though. I have adoption heros who love unconditionally in more difficult situations. Ones who have adopted older children who are suffering so much from their past that they take it out on their parents in horrible and heartbreaking ways. Yet these parents still love them and do all they can to help them heal. And I am humbled and amazed by their unconditional love.
My song for today: "Unconditionally " by Katy Perry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjwZAa2EjKA (Other good ones: "I Won't Give Up" by Jason Mraz, "Wanted" by Hunter Hayes, The Promise" by Tracy Chapmpan, "I'll Stand By You" by The Pretenders, "You and Me" by Lifehouse, and "Show You Love" by Jars of Clay.)