Top Ten

Dear Baby Girl, While you are blissfully slumbering in your not yet one-year-old cocoon, Daddy and I came up with a list of our most favoritest things that we have done with you in your first year of life. They are as follows, in no particular order: 10. Rocking you to sleep and/or the general act of your warm little bundled body falling asleep in our laps. 9. Taking you to the Murphy Pool almost every day of summer and watching you playfully interact/make lovey eyes at all of the lifeguards. 8. Holding you for the first time, 44 hours after Mama's water broke, 40ish minutes after they stitched her back up. 7. Coming home to you at any point wherein you leaped to greet us like an excited puppy. 6. Getting startled and then laughing that you had taught yourself to sit up by yourself in your crib. 5. The night we took you to Fenway Park for the first time. 4. Taking long walks with you in the neighborhood and just smiling because we were walking you. 3. Your pixie voice when you say, Daddy, Mom, Light, Ball, Doggie, Hi, Bottle, and Horsey. 2. Seeing you demonstrate your affection on all stuffed animals, similarly sized children after which you always say, Awwww. 1. Checking on you each night before we go to bed where you sleep peacefully; every day ends as the best day in life after we do this.

Approaching the First Mile

I am trying to be so business-like about a first birthday that is supposedly occurring this Saturday for someone in our household. I have been sanitizing and putting babyish things in storage, squirreling away clothes that do not fit, and shelving all of the First Year Instructional books like I am some kind of nurse orderly, dutiful and unsentimental. But the truth is that my heart is so heavy. My baby is inching swiftly away from babyhood and I am devastated. I did not think I would be like this, that the pangs of Let Them Be Little would debilitate me as they have. I met another mother this morning who told me she cried when her son turned one and it didn't make me feel any better. I wanted to grab her arm and ask her AND THEN WHAT? What did you do after you were done crying?

I am embracing all the nuances that surface in a day with my daughter, how last week she was pleased to be contained to her little baby bath tub and this week she's mounting the side of the big tub, like, I think I'm getting a little pruney, yeah...time's up. She's still a little peanut, but she is increasingly so big in my eyes, spunky and strong, with a set of lungs that could wake the deaf dead. But I feel protective over the waning baby in my arms. I want her to have her own friends and adventures and suntans and sleepovers, but I ache to think about the betrayals and break-ups and bug bites not so far down the road for her. The ones that I will see coming and the ones that I too will be completely blindsided from anticipating, and for which I will not have a modicum of insight on how to deal with, because I've never done this before.

But she's still my infant for a little while longer. Oh please. Even when she's one hundred years-old, she'll still be my Baby Girl.

Becoming a Daddy

How does one become a daddy? I know anyone can lend his special sauce and father a child. But how does one evolve to become someone that a pixie in pajamas looks up to call "Daddy"?

When I was pregnant, I used to make Loverpants set out my snack each morning, reminding him that it was for his child, like this was some home ec project that he needed to keep up with or the potato would warp and grow strange ears if left to neglect. I wasn't training him to be a daddy. I was just trying to share some of the burden of having to hold this living unnamed creature in my consciousness. It only seemed fair.

I can tell you what becoming a mommy has meant to me, and that is basically summed up by a constant feeling of awe and fear that there is a life in the world that I am responsible for loving so much it makes my entire being quake, and thankfully that love is not hard to come by, at least not right now.

But becoming a daddy is a phenomenon I don't completely comprehend. Daddies don't carry children (unless you are this guy), they don't birth children, they don't boobfeed children, they can certainly adopt children and assist in the rapid dismissal of a child from the womb to the world.

So I am amazed, truly dumbfounded by the love that follows from one daddy that I know. How did he become like this? I don't completely know. But I know this. He is always keeping an eye out for changes in his baby girl. He loves to shop online for her clothes, loves to sing to her, loves to invent new voices to capture her interest while reading books. He looks with eager anticipation at the future and all of the frisbee games and bike rides it holds on some fiery sky horizon, their two shadows so discernible, Father and Daughter, Daddy and Baby Girl.