My, how the time flies. Two months old today. It doesn’t seem possible that we are here already, like we surely haven’t had enough hours with you yet to rack up this kind of age. Perhaps that’s because you sleep away so many of those hours. (We’re not complaining – keep up the good work.) Just saying.
In this past month you started to smile, and have since gone on to master it. You are less startled by your surroundings, more apt to look around and take it in than cry from being overwhelmed. You have stretched right out of those newborn footed pajamas – your feet never fit in them anyway. You are working on that second chin and that third thigh roll, which makes you even more irresistible to your sister’s constant kisses. We eat you up all the time, and you patiently let us nibble.
Yesterday you and I went to see an exhibit of quilts at the history museum, and your eyes were so round as you looked at those graphic colors and patterns. I couldn’t leave you in your stroller – you had to see them up close and you charmed the other visitors in the room. We stayed in that one room for over an hour, just studying the quilts and talking quietly to one another, and then we stretched out under the trees outside and stared up at the patterns the branches were making against the sky until you turned your head sideways towards my neck, yawned the sleepiest of yawns, and closed your eyes to the rustling leaves above. I scooped you onto my chest, felt the downy softness of your hair tickling my chin in the breeze, and the rise and fall of your back, two to one with the rise and fall of my breath. I spent that moment being so thankful that I was there and able to enjoy it, to savor it. Grateful for all the things everyone had done for me that allowed me to get to that place so quickly from the place I’d been before. Now I have to find a way to leave that moment, to know that it is fleeting and ever changing and that we will never lie there, just like that again. We may do it again tomorrow, but your smile will be different, your breath will be more evolved, that tiny tooth that showed up will be that much closer, your toes that much longer, your thoughts that much more refined, yourself that much more independent. You pull and tug your firstborn excitedly, impatiently along that way of change and growth; you hold your lastborn longer on that blanket on the grass under the canopy of leaves with your chin in her hair, slowing your breathing to her sleep, and pray for frozen time.
Yesterday you and I went to see an exhibit of quilts at the history museum, and your eyes were so round as you looked at those graphic colors and patterns. I couldn’t leave you in your stroller – you had to see them up close and you charmed the other visitors in the room. We stayed in that one room for over an hour, just studying the quilts and talking quietly to one another, and then we stretched out under the trees outside and stared up at the patterns the branches were making against the sky until you turned your head sideways towards my neck, yawned the sleepiest of yawns, and closed your eyes to the rustling leaves above. I scooped you onto my chest, felt the downy softness of your hair tickling my chin in the breeze, and the rise and fall of your back, two to one with the rise and fall of my breath. I spent that moment being so thankful that I was there and able to enjoy it, to savor it. Grateful for all the things everyone had done for me that allowed me to get to that place so quickly from the place I’d been before. Now I have to find a way to leave that moment, to know that it is fleeting and ever changing and that we will never lie there, just like that again. We may do it again tomorrow, but your smile will be different, your breath will be more evolved, that tiny tooth that showed up will be that much closer, your toes that much longer, your thoughts that much more refined, yourself that much more independent. You pull and tug your firstborn excitedly, impatiently along that way of change and growth; you hold your lastborn longer on that blanket on the grass under the canopy of leaves with your chin in her hair, slowing your breathing to her sleep, and pray for frozen time.
pictures by her dad