Balance

Hi baby girl.

I'm away for a few days, learning how to be better at my job during the day.  But my favorite job is being your Mama and having nights and weekends with you and your Daddy.  On Saturdays we always stay in our pajamas and make bacon and eggs and strong coffee (which someday you will love, but for now are too little to taste...although you want to).  We sit in the dining room and take the morning easy and watch you play.  It's glorious.  I am missing you both and our weekend routine like crazy.

There are lots of girl doctors here that don't have daughters yet.  Sometimes it's hard for women to decide how to make it all work together, to have a job and still be a Mama.  The important thing is that you always do the thing that makes your heart sing, and never decide to do something or NOT to do something because you're afraid.  Things always work out one way or another.  You can be an artist, or a musician, or a doctor, or a maker-of-beautiful-pastries, or maybe all of the above at different times in your life.  Sometimes you'll ache for balance and won't be able to find it - life can be that way, demanding more of you in one direction one week, then in another direction the next.  Try to look at it all over the long haul.  In the end, you can do anything and everything, just not all at the same time.

So this week, I'm being a good doctor and missing my family.  Next weekend, no work and lots of time to watch you learn new words and laugh at falling leaves and relax.

Birthday Girl

Suddenly, you are all grown up.

I get the feeling that I'm going to have this moment repetitively over the years to come.  Some days you wake up and I think, "when did you get so big?  Where did my baby go?"  I will always treasure the days when you were tiny and you let me hold you for hours and hours.  But I love to watch you grow and change into this little autonomous decision maker, this little bundle of energy and thought and joy.  Here you are, a whole year old already, and I can hardly believe that you're moving from bottles to cups and from being fed to feeding yourself.  

You had two first birthday parties.  The first one was two weeks ago, when all of our family came to celebrate your dedication in church.  We set up tables in our driveway outside the little duplex where we're living at the moment, and almost thirty people wanted to hold you and give you gifts and dance around with you in the sun.  We had a great time, and I think you did, too.  You shared half of your birthday cupcake with Lucy.

This weekend, we celebrated again with our neighbors and friends.  We planned to paint and carve pumpkins in the yard, but it rained and turned cold, and instead we crammed two dozen adults and a handful of your friends (Tanner, Eden, Ethan, and Naomi) huddled inside and painted pumpkins on our living room floor.  It was absolute craziness, and we loved every second of celebrating YOU.  Your life is a pretty fantastic thing, little one.  You smile so easily, you love to be surprised, you have a trust that no matter what crazy circle you're spinning around in, you'll be caught before you hit the ground too hard.  I love it.  I love you.  You make our lives a hundred times more beautiful.

Happy birthday to my one-year-old Allegra.

Bye bye, Lucy

We said goodbye to our dog, Lucy, yesterday.  It was harder than I thought it would be, considering she's only going to Aunt Becky's house and possibly not forever.  Lucy is a tiny little dog, a chihuaua / yorkie mix, and she has never liked little kids.  We hoped when we found out that we were going to have you that Lucy would just overlook the fact that you're a baby, but as you've started to get better at getting around, it's been rough around here.  We're concerned that she might bite you if you do your normal kid stuff around her...fall too close, pull on her tail, stick your hands in her face.  Last weekend we had a party celebrating your dedication at church, and Lucy had enough with all the people and kids.  She started pooping and peeing all over our house.  Your Daddy and I decided it was time to say goodbye.

It's much quieter here now, and that's sad, even though I think it's best.  I keep expecting to see her roaming around or having to keep you away from her crate.  Every time you go over to where she used to live, I feel really sorry that we didn't train her better before you were born.  We did the best we could, though, and that's all you can ever do.

I wanted to tell you about this because it reminds me of something that is true about life.  Sometimes you have to choose between two things that you want, two things that both seem good.... or sometimes, between two options that both seem bad.  It's hard to know what to do in situations like that.  It's tempting to choose not to decide at all, to just sit and ponder things or pray that God will show you the right thing to do. For a while, that's not a bad idea.

Eventually, though, you have to make a hard choice.  Allegra, everyone goes through this.  It helps to figure out your priorities first to give you some direction.  So you sit down and decide first what's most important to you, and what's second most important, and so on.  Make sure most of your decisions reflect your priorities accurately and you'll never get too far off base.  And then you just gather the best information you have, and you do it.  You decide, and you let yourself be sad that you can't always have everything you want at the same time.

In the end, baby girl, I believe you will always have what you need, even if it's not always what you want.  So be brave when you need to be.  The world is big and full of possibilities you haven't even thought of yet.  We will miss Lucy. Maybe someday, when you're a little bigger, she can come home.  For now, we're trying to focus on what's more important: you.

Your Space

Before we met you, I swore my house would never look like the homes of some of our friends who have children.  Messy, cluttered, toys scattered everywhere.  After all, I have my own life and my own friends, and I've waited a long time to have a space that's just mine, to create it any way I like.  I'm an organized, pile-happy, cautiously creative girl who likes some extra space on the carpet to spread out my project-of-the-moment, so there's no room for castaway duplos and weeble-wobbles.

It was just impossible to anticipate what a little person you'd be.  Not just a little girl, but an independent, mind-of-her-own, laughing-climbing-always-moving monkey that swings from the railings and is obsessed with things that open and close.  You are liquid sunshine, and your little blonde head bobbing around at knee-level makes my heart flip over every time I see you, and it actually doesn't matter how much of a mess you're creating.  And thus, our home is turning into that home, the one with the undeniable presence of a little one.

This weekend, we're taking half of our living room and making a play space for you, a place to put your toys and books and the few kitchen items that you've claimed as yours and won't give back.  We don't have a big place, since your Daddy and I are still trying to get back on our feet after too many years of education and school loans.  So we found a book shelf at a yard sale and spent the past two weekends stripping the paint off of it and sanding it down.  This weekend, we'll paint it a bright yellow and put it beside your alphabet rug, and gladly share our space with you.

I love you, baby girl, in a way that I can't even describe.  Hope you like your little dreaming corner.

I stand, I'm a stander

You learned how to pull yourself up this weekend!  You are very proud of yourself, and excited to the point that you can barely sleep.  Every time we put you in your crib, you see the wooden slats around you and you reach up and climb to your knees and then to your feet, and then you smile this huge smile and proclaim, "EEEEEEeeeee", which is your way of saying, "look Mama, I am a stander!  I stand!"  You do this every chance you get.

The only problem is that you don't know how to get down.  So you get up and look out over the edge of your crib, and then...you get tired.  Then you cry, and I come and lay you back down and remind you that you have to sleep in order to have enough energy to grow and learn.  But those wooden slats are just begging for you to climb them again, and so you roll over and pull yourself up again, only to realize how tired you are once more.

It's hard to grow, because you don't learn all the things you need to know at the same time.  Sometimes you learn to stand before you learn to get down again.  You learn how to push yourself before you learn how to nap. You learn to love before you learn how to guard your heart. In life, you'll want to be balanced, but with growth coming in spurts, there will be times when you can't be.  And that's ok - learning the other side of the coin will come soon enough. 

For now, we're pretty darn proud of your standing-ness.

Letters to Allegra

Hi Baby Girl.

You are eight whole months old already.  I can hardly believe how quickly you're growing and changing.  It seems like you learn something new every day.  Getting to know you has been one of the most amazing things I've ever experienced, and I've experienced a lot of fantastic things in life so far.  Thanks for making me a Mama, Ali.  I love you.

This place will be between you and me, a place for us to know each other.  One of the things I hope to be able to do for you as your Mama is to help you to be sure of yourself, of who you are and of what fiber you are made.  It's easy to lose track of that sometimes; I know this first-hand.  I also know how quickly time passes and how sometimes we can forget even the most incredible of days.  I want to help you capture the moments of your life and maybe help you to grasp how amazingly good life is, even when it's not easy. 

Allegra Joy, you are my daughter, and there's not a thing in the world that I love more than your Daddy and you.  We are a pretty sweet team, the three of us, and we're going to have a whole lot of adventures together.

I love you,
Mama