Visiting the new Hershberger

The stack of receiving blankets, tiny T-shirts, pastel kimonos, patterned sleepers and petite socks I found at garage sales for our expected grandchild overwhelmed my daughter-in-love. She puzzled over the quantity and variety – until the day they came home with the baby. “Everything I needed was right here.”
Everything except the diapers. Until the last minute the parents-to-be were still debating which to sue: Diaper service, disposables or cloth diapers and I would not decide for them.
I had to check out the infant wearing the garage sale finds. Friday afternoon, my husband, son and I took my teenage daughter to catch a ride to central Mexico for a spring break to catch a ride to central Mexico for a spring break, mission work trip. As she faded into the horizon, we headed to New Orleans to visit the newest Hershberger.
It was after midnight when we arrived for the command performance. My son lined us up at the foot of their winding staircase to heaven. As we looked up expectantly, his wife peeked around the corner of the banister, grinned and descended with the heir to the throne of our hearts.
Her proud and eager uncle was first to grab the tiniest person our family has known. He wasn’t willing to share once he had possession, either. Resting the baby on his shoulder on a receiving blanket, he patted her back. As I video taped them, her father, using a “nah-nah” voice greeted his absent sister, “Aren’t you sorry went to Mexico to work when you could have been here with us?”
The baby was not worried. She scratched her face and peered at her uncle blandly through dark eyes. He exclaimed over her tiny fingers and toes until she whimpered and a bottle appeared to comfort her. I taped him trying to juggle the baby and hold the bottle satisfactorily. When the diaper needed changing though, he quickly handed his niece back to her mother.
Freshly powdered and content the tiny one snuggled next to her mother who sighed, “After four years of college and half a dozen jobs, I finally know what I want to do with my life.”
She looked down at the babe in her arms and said philosophically, “Babies are created in a moment of pleasure to bring a lifetime of joy.”
I got a piece of that joy myself. At supper the next day she was fussing. Her momma rocked, patted and offered her a bottle to no avail. She wasn’t hungry. She wanted as my mother used to say, to join the family fun.
I reached and took her, patter her back here and there, said a few soft words and stared deeply into her dark eyes. She studied me quietly as I made faces and whispered nonsense to her.
Her mother said, “Do you realize she calms down every time you take her?”
Ahh, the mother of four, the expert on handling babies. The super-Mom who knows that little babies go through lots of sleepers and receiving blankets and knows where to buy good ones for a few coins. But of course, 25 years of parenting ought to be good for something.