Reflecting On the Early Days

My sweet Angelica is now a walking, running, talking, screaming, squealing, chock-full-of-personality 13 month old, but as I've been getting some files organized on my computer, I've been looking over pictures from the early days. It's true what they say about the memory of a mother -- you always remember the good and forget the bad, and it the past is always tinted rose.

I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. This was the hardest part of the early days for me. I am and have always been the kind of person who needs 8-10 hours of sleep each night in order to function. While friends and family bragged about their babies who slept through the night at six weeks, I was blessed with a baby who was still getting up at least once, if not twice a night at nine months old. Both SuperScott and I were perpetually exhausted and I was  frazzled beyond belief for months.

Today, though, we were feeding Angelica dinner and watching YouTube videos of kids cartoons with her, and I came across one that she and I watched together one of those early mornings when she had woken up at 4:45 in the morning and was ready to go for hours, and it felt like it was just yesterday that we were sitting there on the couch and I was singing the cartoon songs to her and tickling her little baby belly. Remembering that, a feeling washed over me...how much I miss those days! (And yes, I am one of those moms who lets her baby watch TV! Oh no!)

The Fourth of July was also one of these moments. Last year on the Fourth of July, I had a five week old baby Angelica, and we decided to brave a party at one of SuperScott's co-workers homes...when they did fireworks, I sat and cuddled with my little sleeping angel, covering her ears so that the fireworks wouldn't scare her (or hurt her eardrums). That day was also the first time she smiled a genuine smile at us, and I was lucky enough to be just snapping the shutter on my camera when she did it.

 

[caption id="attachment_214" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Fourth of July 2008"][/caption]

This year...cuddling? Forget it! This child wanted to run down and pick up still smoldering fireworks (or eat them) so it was spent chasing, holding, and  restraining her. I was so frazzled last year, worried that we were keeping the newborn up too late or breaking a schedule (HA! A schedule at 5 weeks? What was I thinking?).  This year we've got the schedule down to a science. But hey, despite all the screaming, chasing, struggling, and sticking to a rigid schedule (set by her, not us!) we still had a good time. By comparison, that 6 week old was a lot easier than our 13 month old. And oh, what a difference a year makes.

[caption id="attachment_215" align="aligncenter" width="214" caption="Fourth of July 2009"][/caption]

 

Now that we're in the land of sleeping through the night, from 8 p.m. - 8 a.m. (she might wake up earlier than that, but she sits in her crib and plays and hardly makes a peep) I find that we spend less time together. I miss the quality snuggle time we had those sleepy mornings at 4:00 or 5:00. It's very strange to me that I feel this way, considering how much I wished she would just sleep back then. It's so bittersweet, especially when you consider that there isn't the luxury of one-on-one time whenever you want it when you have the second baby, so you can never really go back.

Knowing this just makes me want to cherish each moment even more than I already do, because in a year I will probably be saying the same thing about this time in our lives as well.