Indent. New paragraph

Baby Girl is writing a new chapter in her second year of life. The words are "Daddy" and "Bopple" repeated over and over, and they, along with screeches and rejected scraps of food and scrunched up faces, form long sentences that stretch for whole afternoons. The sentences are punctuated with sweet moments. The sweet moments are the commas, semi-colons, exclamation marks. I realize that in every great book, though, there are difficult chapters to read. There are chapters that make us feel uncomfortable and on edge but we know we have to get through them, we're bracing ourselves to read faster so that we can get through them to the part where all is resolved or the denouement casts light on what was murky for so long. Both Lovey Loverpants and I are trying to get through this chapter and are trying not to rush ourselves through it, but it is a rocky one that we are reading and writing right along with Baby Girl.

A friend asked me recently if I still felt exhausted and I said that the physical exhaustion has given way to an emotional exhaustion. Sometimes, when it's clear that both the girl and I have just grown bored of one another and we are biding our time until Daddy gets home, I just kind of want to sit back and read a book or watch "Oprah" or give myself a manicure. But I don't. I sit and nod for the eleventieth time that yes, that is a bottle of lotion, and yes, let's read Gossie and Friends just to see if they still find Oliver at the end SPOILERS, and just as the blood vessel behind my left eye is just about to pop from the tedium, Daddy gets home or saves the day, or Little Miss Sunshine emerges with a gratuitous hug for her mother, along with a sloppy licky-kiss and a pinch of my earlobe and I know that I must have just been stuck on a paragraph; I just needed to turn the page was all.

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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.