her able hands

This post is my contribution to the blog book tour for The Baby Bonding Book for Dads: Building a Closer Connection With Your Baby by James Di Properzio, and Jennifer Margulis (my east-then-west coast home girl who really needs to land in the middle land here some day so we can have margaritas and some girlfriend time, dangit). James and Jennifer are married and have three gorgeous kids and live too damn far away.

Both of my children were conceived out of wedlock and for a time in my life I joked that maybe my real purpose on earth is to turn men into fathers. Good thing it didn’t happen a third time, I hear that’s the charm. But seriously, watching the fathers of my two wonderful children holding their newborn babies, witnessing their hearts unfolding was some of the most gorgeous life I have lived. Watching a man turn into a soft puddle of love is beyond beautiful.

Reading Jennifer and James’ book brought me right back to those times. I didn’t get to see Chris meet Lila because hers was an emergency birth and the morphine had hit pretty hard by that time, but I loved hearing all of my family and friends tell me about how he became singularly focused on her tiny body in the incubator. How he kept his hand on her tummy while the nurses did all of their nursy things and made sure she was healthy (two weeks early–perfectly healthy) and wouldn’t let her out of his sight for those hours while I slid in and out of consciousness in recovery. I’m so happy they had each other because I wasn’t able to offer anything but some hallucinating psychobabble. Hey! I can see through my eyelids! This is awesome! Am I at the White Party at the Filmore East again?

This book is full of gorgeous photography and sweet tidbits of how fathers can and do bond with their babies. It’s one of those books I wish was around ten years ago when everybody I knew was having a baby so I could have given it to all of the soon-to-be fathers at the baby showers. But now I’m making new friends and some of them are just starting out creating families, so I know I’ll be tucking it into more than one gift basket in the next year. I think it would be very reassuring to a new father to see these images of fathers connecting so completely with their babies, and to get a few pointers on how to do it themselves. It might be a nice alternative to what Peter and Chris had to deal with: me telling them everything they were doing wrong. Ah, new motherhood. Good times.

Want to see what the book’s all about for yourself? Check out The Baby Bonding Book For Dads Blog

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