To Our First Baby

My sweet little boy, you will be one next week, yet it feels like you’ve filled our whole hearts for so much longer. I wish you could understand how you have changed your daddy and I’s world. Before you, I was content, I was happy, I didn’t feel like you were missing. Your daddy and I had a life full of love and laughter and joy, but I never could have fathomed how the fullness and joy could multiply and grow once you entered our world.

Before you, it didn’t feel like you were missing, but now that you’re here, when I think of my life before you, it seems like it has a massive piece missing, a huge space in our hearts that you weren’t yet occupying. As your little brother or sister grows in my belly right now, I can’t help but reminisce over the precious time we have shared together, just us and you.

I will never forget this year. The times you slept in my arms and wouldn’t sleep anywhere else, as I wished for some time for myself but also loved holding your warm, relaxed little body. As I pulled you into bed with me at night when you couldn’t sleep and held your forehead against mine. You holding your little chubby hand to my face as you looked into my eyes when I sang you lullabies at night. Your soft, brand new features – big blue eyes, perfect skin, soft hair, gummy smile. How your eyebrows crinkle when you focus really hard on something. How you wave your arms up and down so frantically when you’re excited. How your adorable eyes squint a little when you smile at me. How your giggle (especially your belly laugh) is my all time favorite sound – I could never fathom a simple noise filling my heart with so much joy.

I wish you could understand now how special you are to me. How you have changed my life and made me love being a mom more than anything. How I miss you even when you’re just taking a nap or have gone to bed for the night. I know this new baby and any we have after him/her will be just as important to us, and I can’t wait to meet them and love them just as fiercely as you, but you are special because you made us parents – you made me a mom. You made our world start spinning for a whole different reason. You make us feel a love so all consuming it’s impossible to articulate and at the same time a fear we’ve never known at the thought of something happening you. You get all our attention and love right now because it’s just you. You are the most amazing gift.

In the years to come, I know you’ll grow up, get married, and be an adult, but even in that stage of life, I know I’ll look back on this first year and remember the sweet time we spent together, just us and you, our first baby. How in awe of you we were. All I can do now is soak up these moments when you are still so little, when it’s still just you, and cherish every second of it, because – though the future stages will be amazing, too – I know these moments with you will always be special and tender and something we look back on with an aching fondness.

You taught us a whole new form of love, our first precious baby, and our lives are forever changed by you.

(Photograph by Pure Joy Photography)