Dear Molly,
You are here.
You are definitely here.
I love you so much. I mean really I do - I wasn't sure I would. It was probably my biggest fear: that you would get here and I would just completely not love you. But I love you so much it hurts. You do these awesome stretches where you reach with your whole body and I feel like my heart may explode. You follow my face with your eyes and I'm totally impressed. And you are pretty. I mean really really really pretty. Everyone thinks so. Apparently I'm ridiculously shallow, because when they took you out, I was laying on the table and your dad went over to see you. I yelled out "Pat! Does she look like an alien?" Everyone in the OR started cracking up. One nurse said "Usually people ask if the baby is healthy..." Whoops!
You are healthy, and you do not look like an alien. You are beautiful.
You are a serious baby. You crinkle your brow in concentration, trying to figure out this new home for you. You finally recognize my voice and your dad's voice. Speaking of your dad, he's totally amazing with you. I mean, he can bounce with the best of them. Hilariously, the other day he was bouncing with you to make you stop crying and he brought you in to change your diaper. I walked in and you were laying on the table and your dad was still bouncing. We bounce while we walk, while we sit, on the exercise ball, on the bouncy seat. We are basically in a perpetual state of bounce around here.
Your arrival was dramatic. And to be honest, not that great for me. I'll just say you owe me. 36 hours of labor and and emergency c section later, you were here in full effect. We've had some issues (you lost alot of weight when you were born and we have had impressively large problems with breast feeding and you've recently developed some less than glamorous baby acne), but you are really such a good baby.
 |
| first family photo. not exactly as planned. |
You are still pretty little. But at the doctor yesterday we found out that you are in the 60th percentile for length but only the 10th percentile for weight. You really are tall and skinny :)
There are days that I feel like a really bad mom. Sometimes it even makes me cry. Sometimes, after we have been up in the middle of the night for 2 hours of the feeding, bottle, pump, rock to sleep routine, I'll swaddle you all up and you'll spit up on yourself. And if its not very much or I can wipe most of it up, I put you into bed with it on you. How awful, I know - but the thought of waking you up to re-swaddle and start the whole process again is just exhausting.
Many people say that the first 6 weeks is the hardest. I'm not going to lie, I hope they are right. This is hard. I'm used to being good at things I decide to do. And if I'm not good at something (like sports or speaking Chinese), I just avoid it like the plague so its not obvious that I'm challenged by something. With you not only can I not avoid it - but I definitely don't want to. When I get discouraged, I think of how you make this perfect little O with your mouth sometimes or how you yawn for a full 30 seconds or how you stretch when you wake up, and I know that I love you very very much and hopefully that is enough to make up for mistakes I make.
Keep growing. I'll keep trying. We'll get the hang of this.
I love you, Molly. So very much.
Love,
Mom
P.S. everything takes SO much longer to do now. I've been working on this for over 2 weeks (your first two letters probably took 20 minutes total) and I don't even really like it, but before I know it, you'll be 2 months and it will be time for the next one!! (in addition to the delay on this, there is also the mounds of laundry and the bottles laying around and the fact that if your Grammy and Grandpa hadn't been here this week, we would have been 3 weeks without vacuuming).
