My sweetest baby girl,
Tomorrow marks the beginning our our new normal. You are so excited about your baby brother that at times I wonder if maybe you really do grasp all that’s coming your way. You tell me daily how you’ll hold him and kiss him and change his diaper and make his wipes. Every night this week you’ve remembered to thank God for him when you say our dinnertime prayer. It sure does make Mommy and Daddy so happy to see how excited you are. We couldn’t be more thrilled to meet our sweet baby Ephraim…you’ve shown us what a gift it is to be parents and we know what amazing love is in store for us.
But I have to admit that tonight I’m just a little sad. Tomorrow when we tuck you in and head off to the hospital we won’t come back to our house until we’re a family of four. The long, lazy days of just you and me and Sesame Street and quiet lunches and playing on the front step will be gone. Replaced first by the harried life of a home that houses a newborn. Then the hustle and bustle of two preschoolers. And eventually the craziness of kiddos in sports and music and dance and church and…whatever else comes. And all of this is good. I welcome it, embrace it. But I’m so afraid that I’ll miss you. And I’m sad that you’ll probably never remember these two years and 23 days of “just us”. And, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m a little afraid that I’ll start to forget them too.
So if I could plant memories into your daily-growing little brain that I knew would last forever and ever, here are what some of them would be. The first night you were on this earth when I stared at you in amazement and sang “Sarah Lorraine Cobb” over and over and over to the tune of “John Jacob Jingleheimer Smits”. When you were just five weeks old and you helped me throw daddy the best 30th birthday party ever. The many nights before you started crawling that we took of your diaper and let you loose to squirm and roll and giggle and pee all over your bedroom. The daily morning walks we took with Ms. Samantha and Caroline and Ms. Amy and, finally, baby Hayden. Rocking with me every evening before bed while I sang all my old favorite hymns (incidentally, as soon as you could voice your opinion you demanded different songs and won’t even let me get through the first verse of How Great Thou Art anymore…so maybe this is a better memory for me than for you). Your second Easter morning when you got your first “lipstick” from Aunt Lori and we all thought you might just die of happiness and girliness. When we moved to Alabama and you discovered “spendanights” with grandparents – you were so proud to be such a big girl! The first time I whispered “go tickle daddy” into your ear and you decided that anytime anyone whispered anything to you it MUST mean “go tickle daddy”. And my goodness, there’s so much more. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that this internet keeps ticking because so many of our best times are stored right here on Princess Pigbear (which, my dear, we’ll need to be renaming pretty quickly.)
So now I can sleep tonight knowing that I’ve at least tried to tell your little two-year old self how I’m feeling. And I can look forward to meeting our new little guy knowing all the blessings that he’ll be bringing to our family. And I can rejoice in the fact that you’re getting a brother, a bubby, a buddy for life. And that he’s getting the best big sister there ever could be. And maybe one day when you’re a mommy of one on the eve of becoming a mommy of two you’ll be able to read this and know that whatever you’re feeling about it is okay. But for now, I hope you just know that I love you.
Love,
Mommy
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