Her Baby

I wrote this post on 10/7 (as the date above indicates), but one or another things kept it for getting published until now. As of this writing, 10/15, there have been some developments in the Baby Saga.  Stay tuned for updates.  Because I know you have nothing better to do.



This is Sabine's baby.  It's been three weeks now since she could not be without her.  I know where she came from, and it dates back to a project I had to do in school when I was a kid, but I have no idea just how Sabine got a hold of Baby.  Nor do I remember the moment when she must have pulled her from the deep recesses of some drawer.  I do remember the first day Sabine could not be without her and that was a Friday three weeks ago.  I can't think of how it actually happened that we realized Sabine couldn't be without her, but I recall Sabine bringing her to Playschool on the following Monday and I was so nervous that Sabine was going to lose her.  I remember telling people that day that Sabine had been carrying her baby around non-stop since Friday.

Pretty much every day Baby gets lost.  We all enter crisis mode and search for her until she's found.  I think it was the day before I took these pictures that Baby actually got lost in the backyard.  It was then that I realized I needed to take some pictures of her so that we would have something for the milk cartons in case her disappearance ever became more than temporary.  On this day in the backyard (about a week after the relationship began) Sabine was far too busy taking Baby down the slide and tossing her in the air (all the time going "Woohoo, my baby!") to hold her still long enough for me to get a close-up.  I had to hold her for this top picture and Sabine stood at my legs jumping and pawing to get Baby back.

The name Baby is overly repetitive in our house these days.  We already have a 'Baby' and that's an inflatable giraffe that Sabine loves to play with.  So I tried to get her to call this new one Little Baby, but she insists on simply calling her 'My Baby', so then we just refer to it as 'Her Baby'.  We've also got a Baby Honey; Sabine refers to dogs as puppies, so actual puppies have become 'baby puppies'.  I feel like pretty soon everything is our house is going to have some name variation of Baby.

     

Dear Emma

Dear Emma,

      I know you were probably trying to arrive on my birthday and you simply fell short by a few hours.  Don't worry about it, I, of all people, certainly understand the difficulties of being on time.  I'm also interpreting your time and day of arrival as a slight nod in my direction, as if you were saying, Yeah, I could have come on the 2nd of October, but hey, instead of honoring my mom's cousin in that way, I'll take my time because I know she'll totally get the late thing.

      I'm also writing to inform you that two nights in a row Sabine has spent several minutes looking at your picture on my computer before she'll fall asleep.  "Wan she Baby Emma," she demands.  Last night I thought it was safe to turn off the computer, but she asked to see your chubby little picture again and indicated to me that she wanted to give you a kiss.  Which she then did.

      So Miss Emma, we are glad to have you with us, and I am looking forward, with great enthusiasm, to meeting you.  Oh, and please tell your parents that we'd love some more pictures of you when they get the chance.  Hopefully your mom gets to read you this note because I'm sure you're not reading yet, but if you're anything like your parents you're going to be a very smart little thing.


     Welcome to the world, and tell your parents welcome to the club!

Thirty

So I turned 30 yesterday.  Yikes.  If you'll notice, I changed just a few small things on the front page of my blog, including the brief description under the blog title.  When I started this blog I was still sort of a young mom; 23 is young these days in terms of having kids.  But now most of my old school friends are having kids and so 30 is not really such a young age to have kids.  I'm still a mom of young kids, but not so much new at it anymore.

Also, maybe some of you noticed that I stopped posting my daily pictures a couple weeks back?  Or most likely no one really noticed.  I didn't mean to stop so abruptly like that, I meant to make it official and sort of announce it, but one day I got caught up deciding which picture to post and I never got around to narrowing it down to one.  Then I realized that summer was actually over (that was the original challenge - one photo per day all summer long) so I was off the hook.

I really enjoyed putting myself to the test of posting every day like that, and I plan to continue - just needed a little break.  As I was explaining to someone the other day, though, the challenge for me was not in coming up with a photo to post every single day, the hard part for me was narrowing it down to just one picture.  In that way I think I've really condensed our experience of living through this summer and revisiting that time period by going back to old posts will be a much more easier thing to do.  I feel like I've boxed up our memories, the things that were most important, and I'm so happy for having done so.

So I will continue with my project for the fall of 2010.  I wanted to start fresh on the first day of October, but I was too occupied with becoming old turning 30 and whatnot.