Smiling 1
I walked upstairs after a long day at work to Mykala and Essie on the floor. It felt great to join them.
Hi Essie,
You learned how to be by yourself on the floor recently. The first of many steps towards independence. You are a little over 22 inches long today (your mom measured you) and right now, you are held closely to me in the Baby Björn and looking at my left shoulder. We really feel a greater peace in the house now that we can move about to tend to chores and you can happily coo on your blankets, discovering your hands as they wave in front of your face or staring at these picture rails on the wall behind the couch in the living room which transfix you and have done so for the past three weeks.
This picture is currently Mykala’s phone background. I’ve lost significant amounts of time just staring at it before I do anything useful on her phone.
Esmé in the Baby K’Tan.
I think Mykala had been up for 38 hours at this point. Nice smile!
I went to bed on Tuesday evening, expecting to head to work the following morning, a little disappointed that our baby girl’s due date, July 22, had come and gone without a hint of her arrival. But instead of sleep, I felt Mykala’s gentle nudge and heard her voice just a few hours later at 3am: “My contractions started, I think.” She sounded so calm that it took me the better part of an hour to fully wake up and realize that this is The Big Show. We began timing duration and interval of contractions, and true to my computer geekery, I created a new text document in BBEdit that I would later save as labor.txt, here’s a snippet:
Dear baby,
You’re the size of a small watermelon now. Where did the time go? It feels like we were just finding out about you, or moving, or painting your room, or assembling your crib, buying your mattress, picking out your diapers, installing your car seat. Get this: pretty soon I’ll be addressing these to you by your name instead of the generic “baby”. You used to be the size of a grain of basmati rice and now you’re huge!
Dear baby,
Hidden Valley Lane is a great name for a street. Just saying it aloud makes me think the way it rolls off the tongue is rivaled only by the bucolic imagery it evokes. It’s the name of the street on which my family (you know, your dad, grandparents, and auntie Katy) lived for a few years in the late 1980s. In the backyard grew a raspberry patch and on the hot days late in the summer when it was time to pick, my mom gave us little margarine containers to carry the berries. They had little blue “Byerly’s” on the side of them, and the bushes in their raised beds were taller than me.
Dear bébé,
Yesterday, we realized that we have a little over 80 days until we meet you, yet there was no crib in your room. So, we drove on I-494 opposite rush-hour traffic to Ikea, where we picked up a lovely crib for you. I hope you find it meets your standards; it was selected with an eye first towards safety and then esthetics. Did you know there are about a million rules for cribs? Slat spacing, mattress thickness, weight support, wood finish (this crib has none, quite safe!), firmness, hardware, age limits, height guidelines, what can be tied, what must be left out. All to keep you safe. Not that your crib is unsightly, (far from it, in fact I think the charm of its simple lines make it timeless) but I suspect you’ll agree your sleep safety during your formative years is more important than having faddish espresso-colored wood supporting your mattress while you dream. And we simply aren’t sleigh-crib style parents.
Your dad thinks technology is amazing, baby. You keep on growing in there, and we’ll see you in a bit.
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