Headband
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!
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