I’ll Eat You Up, I Love You So

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Chubby baby legs

The other day I was looking at Maggie’s delicious little chubby baby legs and a familiar feeling came over me. I totally wanted to eat her up. I mean, literally put her toes in my mouth. And I was like, “Okay, what IS THIS?!” I’ve felt it before, all the way back to when Henry was a baby, but I never really realized that it might actually be kind of weird. So obviously, I started Googling things.

Turns out, I’m not weird. Well at least not in this case. There’s apparently this phenomenon where moms physiologically respond to their babies in the same way that a hungry person responds to a plate of food. How crazy is that?! It’s an evolutionary mechanism that helps mom and baby bond. It’s your body telling you that it wants to get as physically close to the baby as is humanly possible. And on top of that, new-baby-smell is actually addictive. It lights up the same parts of your brain as drugs and alcohol. Nature totally knows what it’s doing.

And it always makes me think of that line from Where the Wild Things Are: “We’ll eat you up – we love you so!” Those wild things had it right all along. xoxo

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