*kendraspondence*

Dear Baby Girl,

While you are blissfully slumbering in your not yet one-year-old cocoon, Daddy and I came up with a list of our most favoritest things that we have done with you in your first year of life. They are as follows, in no particular order:
10. Rocking you to sleep and/or the general act of your warm little bundled body falling asleep in our laps.
9. Taking you to the Murphy Pool almost every day of summer and watching you playfully interact/make lovey eyes at all of the lifeguards.
8. Holding you for the first time, 44 hours after Mama’s water broke, 40ish minutes after they stitched her back up.
7. Coming home to you at any point wherein you leaped to greet us like an excited puppy.
6. Getting startled and then laughing that you had taught yourself to sit up by yourself in your crib.
5. The night we took you to Fenway Park for the first time.
4. Taking long walks with you in the neighborhood and just smiling because we were walking you.
3. Your pixie voice when you say, Daddy, Mom, Light, Ball, Doggie, Hi, Bottle, and Horsey.
2. Seeing you demonstrate your affection on all stuffed animals, similarly sized children after which you always say, Awwww.
1. Checking on you each night before we go to bed where you sleep peacefully; every day ends as the best day in life after we do this.

I am trying to be so business-like about a first birthday that is supposedly occurring this Saturday for someone in our household. I have been sanitizing and putting babyish things in storage, squirreling away clothes that do not fit, and shelving all of the First Year Instructional books like I am some kind of nurse orderly, dutiful and unsentimental. But the truth is that my heart is so heavy. My baby is inching swiftly away from babyhood and I am devastated.

I did not think I would be like this, that the pangs of Let Them Be Little would debilitate me as they have. I met another mother this morning who told me she cried when her son turned one and it didn’t make me feel any better. I wanted to grab her arm and ask her AND THEN WHAT? What did you do after you were done crying?

I am embracing all the nuances that surface in a day with my daughter, how last week she was pleased to be contained to her little baby bath tub and this week she’s mounting the side of the big tub, like, I think I’m getting a little pruney, yeah…time’s up. She’s still a little peanut, but she is increasingly so big in my eyes, spunky and strong, with a set of lungs that could wake the deaf dead. But I feel protective over the waning baby in my arms. I want her to have her own friends and adventures and suntans and sleepovers, but I ache to think about the betrayals and break-ups and bug bites not so far down the road for her. The ones that I will see coming and the ones that I too will be completely blindsided from anticipating, and for which I will not have a modicum of insight on how to deal with, because I’ve never done this before.

But she’s still my infant for a little while longer. Oh please. Even when she’s one hundred years-old, she’ll still be my Baby Girl.

How does one become a daddy?

I know anyone can lend his special sauce and father a child. But how does one evolve to become someone that a pixie in pajamas looks up to call “Daddy”?

When I was pregnant, I used to make Loverpants set out my snack each morning, reminding him that it was for his child, like this was some home ec project that he needed to keep up with or the potato would warp and grow strange ears if left to neglect. I wasn’t training him to be a daddy. I was just trying to share some of the burden of having to hold this living unnamed creature in my consciousness. It only seemed fair.

I can tell you what becoming a mommy has meant to me, and that is basically summed up by a constant feeling of awe and fear that there is a life in the world that I am responsible for loving so much it makes my entire being quake, and thankfully that love is not hard to come by, at least not right now.

But becoming a daddy is a phenomenon I don’t completely comprehend. Daddies don’t carry children (unless you are this guy), they don’t birth children, they don’t boobfeed children, they can certainly adopt children and assist in the rapid dismissal of a child from the womb to the world.

So I am amazed, truly dumbfounded by the love that follows from one daddy that I know. How did he become like this? I don’t completely know. But I know this. He is always keeping an eye out for changes in his baby girl. He loves to shop online for her clothes, loves to sing to her, loves to invent new voices to capture her interest while reading books. He looks with eager anticipation at the future and all of the frisbee games and bike rides it holds on some fiery sky horizon, their two shadows so discernible, Father and Daughter, Daddy and Baby Girl.

I’ve been feeling very satisfied about my roles as desperate housewife and baby wrangler this week. I wish I could tell you it is because I had been reflecting on the call of Titus 2 to be a keeper of my home, or that I’ve retrofitted a jacuzzi into my bathroom, or that Baby Girl is walking all because of my patient lead.

But the real reason is because I was reading the gospel according to Martha while I was in Michigan. And now Martha is all up in my head.

Martha is not someone that I suspect many of us look at and think, “Well, if Martha can do that, then surely so can I!” We all know that she operates with a team of elf people prepping her kitchen and tilling her farm in the Hamptons and making sure she has full bottles of toner to keep her Botoxy forehead looking all smooth and supple. Rather, I imagine that most of you all are like I am and look at her and wonder: If I had what she has, would I still do it like she does?

Or would I sit back in my yoga pants clearing out the DVR while eating Twizzlers for lunch and still have traces of yesterday’s mascara smudged around my eyes?

I’d like to think that I would at least attempt to live upright like Martha, if I had all that help. But since I don’t, I try to steal germs of what I believe to be her lifestyle. At least the life that she purports to live, BECAUSE MAGAZINES DON’T LIE, YOUNG.

I was really inspired by how clean she tries to keep her office(s). So this week I’ve been cleaning up the kitchen before I endeavor to do any other shenanigans. I cleaned out the science experiments in the fridge. I’ve tried to have the kitchen table cleared before Lovey Loverpants get home. I’ve also really tried to live out the “no time like the present” with my other chores. And you know what? I don’t have as much dread about all that I have to do, because I’ve been kissing all the ugly frogs first and then the rest of the details all look like handsome princes.

I know this sounds so fundamental, so big fat DUH to many of you, but I’ve been stuck for a couple months on what I esteem to be my duties and what I feel are things that eventually someone will get to, at some point. When a black guy becomes president. Oh snap that’s NOW!

I’m amazed that something like an article in a magazine for hypermanic domestics could help me to refocus my priorities and realize that it’s not all about me. I want a clean home so that I and everyone else I love that lives in it or visits it will feel at ease. It’s so basic, but yet so hard to realize internally and then to master.

If you’ll excuse me now. I need to see if we have any Twizzlers for lunch.

I have returned to my cold compact home unit after five days spent at my in-laws where the climate indoors is warm and dry enough to make you have Hard Booger Nose. The last five days were much like a religious retreat, the kind where you’re forced to go without television and internet and where you spend a lot of time talking about epiphanies and reading and sitting around on couches in a circle and laughing and being reminded that family and laughter and navel oranges are really the essentials in this life. Of course, the retreat was held in honor of Baby Girl, in celebration of her first birthday, which is on the horizon but which we observed with my entire immediate blended crazy fabulous family all around, too.

I am glad to be back in my own home where my nose runs naturally and where I eat sparingly the soy and kimchi and rice-based foods that are the cuisine of my in-laws but which make me start tweaking for some greasy cheese pizza after a few days. But as I sit here on my commodious couch with freshly-folded laundry and half-read books and write this account for all of you dearhearts while Lovey Loverpants watches Jack Bauer say serious things to threatening villans, my heart feels very filled and I am still on my retreat high. An excellent spirit to carry into this new era of hope and change and Together We Can….

***

Auntie Shannon

Harmonee

Nana Red

Auntie TP

Pennie the Weiner Dog Roasting by the Open Fire

…and a preview of her Korean Princess photo-shoot: