You're eight months old. You're huge - a big bundle of girl, all rolls of fat and grins and grabbing hands. You've learnt to move, commando crawling around the house at top speed, yelling with delight at the new-found freedom. I turn my head and you're gone, zooming out of the room, your position betrayed by your own exuberance and your escaping shout. You greet us now, the ones you know - with a specific call, an almost-sigh and a smile as we come into view, you reach up your arms and gaze upwards waiting for one of us to hold you. If we're late by a milisecond you shout at us - 'how dare you move past me? How DARE you ignore me?' You're changing by the second and also not at all - you've always been like this, you're just growing in confidence.
We danced, yesterday, around the kitchen before tea - you holding my neck and giggling, and me pressed to your cheek, swinging you around to the music on the radio. I used to dance like this with your big brother, and I danced too while you were still inside, holding the bump of you and dancing to the same songs. Maybe you remember them. I hold you and breathe in the still-baby smell of you and wonder how to keep this moment. How to keep it safe and remembered because it passes too fast. You grow almost in front of my eyes. I imagine your future - spiralling away in front of us, of you, and it looks brilliant. I watch you from two angles - I see you now, bright and bouncing and grinning in front of me, and at the same time I'm hurtled into the future, looking back on this, remembering it as it happens - my children growing up while I stand and watch - a spectator.
So, you're 2. You're more than 2 now - 2 and 3 months, and convinced you are not only the centre of the universe but controlling it too. It's your job to tell people what to do, when to do it and if they're not doing it exactly right. You are our self-appointed policeman. You're always on duty - from 7am until you finally give up after an hour of talking to your toy dogs in bed you don't stop talking: 'What's that mummy?' 'What's that lady doing mummy?' 'Where are you mummy?' 'What you doing mummy?' 'What does that do mummy?' I answer all your questions, so aware that this is building your world. Every question has an answer and each answer is stored away carefully, to be brought out when I'd forgotten all about it and marvel again at your memory, at your capacity to learn. You literally soak everything up, even things I don't think you're taking in. I have to remind myself sometimes that although you can't always uphold your part of the conversation you definitely understand everything. I creep in to make sure the duvet is over you at night when I go to bed, and sometimes you stir as I tuck you in - you shoot your head up and shout out 'yep!' or 'tractor!' then lie back down and sleep again, it makes me laugh that you're still reporting for duty even in your dreams.
You're aware of the dark suddenly, not necessarily scared of it, you'll sit happily in your pitch-black bedroom still, but just aware of it, the absence of light. One night I wasn't allowed to turn the light off at all, and for another hour you played in bed in the light, until I had to go upstairs and tell you to lie down as I switched the light off and gave you darkness back again. You accepted it then. At some point in the last month your imagination suddenly switched on, perhaps that's linked to the wariness of dark - before that, the world was all that you could touch and see, but now there's that extra dimension of imagination, and there could be things in the dark that you can neither see nor touch. The upside of this is the imaginary games; every spoonful of food is an aeroplane, every chair a tractor. We make journeys of thousands of miles a day to visit 'Mark and Saja', and reenact stories again and again. You are often the doctor and I'm the patient, and you earnestly consult your imaginary medicine cupboard for the right medicine before pouring it, complete with sound effects, into an imaginary spoon to make me better.
Earlier this morning I bent down to your level to talk about something, and you held my gaze absolutely throughout our conversation, you forget how little eye contact adults give you until you talk to a toddler on their own level. You stared at me intensely, your eyes telling me the bits your vocabulary didn't stretch to, then you considered for a moment and hurled yourself at me for a hug, flinging your arms around me, but only fleetingly. Everything you do is still done in short intense bursts. A hug may only be a few seconds, but those few seconds hold the world.
You use car journeys and the time before sleep to categorise your world, put it all in order. You list your family: mummy, daddy, dog-dog, midge. Over and over - building us around you. You like boundaries too, like your baby sister.
1. You demand my absolute and full attention. There's no fobbing you off with half-hearted, half-glancing looks; you fix me with your glare, demand to be looked at. It's no hardship to look at you, and maybe you do me a favour. I have to stop what I'm doing to attend to you, you will not tolerate multi-tasking. You want it all, and you want it right now. It makes me stop, and live the moments seconds by second with you. I'm there with you through your fury at being slighted, deposited, carted around in car seats and bouncy chairs. You hate to 'put' anywhere, unless it's on your terms. I like that about you. You're feisty.
2. You need to be held. Often and close. You like to know where your boundaries are, and you like to know that they're very close to you indeed. You will only sleep in swaddling - even four months along - your arms bound tightly to your sides, your head turned to the left, a satisfied sigh and then surrender.
3. Your moods are often but not various - there are only two: VERY angry and VERY happy. Your smile is amazing. It can change my day in a split-second, from a grey haze of sleep-deprivation to elation. Your eyes smile at me from behind a bottle, they sparkle at me during nappy-changes. Bathtime elicits peals of silent laughter from you - your mouth open wide and tongue sticking out - you chuckle as you kick your chubby legs up and down, your smiles replaced only with a look of intense and solemn concentration as you try to figure out what your legs do.
You're here! After weeks of waiting for you, longing for you (swearing at you to just get out) you came. I sat, miserable, on the sofa, counting down hours to induction and talking to a friend on the phone when I suddenly realised you were on your way. Three hours later I was holding you in the water - my big, wrinkly, scrunched up, flailing daughter. I stared - "you're here! You're here!", still reeling from the speed of you, after all the waiting, the sudden rush of you into my world. You arrived blue and mewling - all 9 pounds 12 of you - like a fat kitten. Whilst your brother's eyes opened straight away and looked at me for hours, you were blind and tentative, eventually opening your eyes to look at me quizzically, wondering, perhaps, if you'd made the right decision in coming here.
Afterwards, I laid down to watch you in your daddy's arms, frantically eating to try to regain some strength. You'd taken me by surprise - I hadn't had any breakfast that morning and was shaking with hunger. After you'd been weighed and measured and examined, investigated from all angles, you were handed back to me - wrapped in a bundle - all cheeks and double chin. I stared at you - exhilarated. My baby girl.
That night, on the ward, you screamed. Pretty much all night. That new-baby screaming, more of a squall, like a small localised storm. Searching for food that I couldn't quite give you yet. I bundled you close to me and lay next to you, breathing your breath, stroking your head - trying to remember every second of this angry little beginning. Lines from poems running through my head. Maybe some things can only be captured by cliches or poetry, something about the concentrated intensity of the experience. Flushed with relief and hormones and endorphins, and giddy from lack of sleep - I loved everyone. Gushingly grateful to the midwives who took you away, fed you and brought you back an hour or so later so I could sleep. I lay and remembered this feeling from your brother's birth - a feeling of belonging, of solidarity. A room full of women, variously bruised and battered, who had all gone through the same incredible thing as me that day. I couldn't wait to take you home.
I don't know why. We're longing to meet her, but she doesn't want to come out. Perhaps she's just too comfortable. Too warm, too safe in there, protected from the world. Perhaps she's just happy there and unwilling to face a world of bright lights, loud noises and cold. I don't blame her. But I've never been this impatient in my life...
I never did have any patience. My brother and I would always search out the Christmas presents from their hiding places early, and I'm fairly sure it was me that instigated the searching. I never had the patience for the 2 week wait between possible conception and pregnancy testing.. it never got any easier. Then the waiting for the scans, the tests, the all-clears... I was not good at any of that waiting. Wanting to know NOW, immediately.
Now, a worse kind of waiting. Waiting for my baby to arrive. I have no control over it - maybe that's the problem. I remember sitting here waiting for my little boy to arrive and feeling the same thing. This time it's worse as I can't sleep. Not at all. Despite being so tired I'm swaying - I cannot get to sleep. I've been like this now for four days. It's not helping. I'm willing her to make an appearance, pleading with her. Nothing. I still have a week to go but I don't know if I can wait that long. Am wondering what the reaction would be at the hospital to a weeping, chronically fatigued, enormously pregnant woman demanding to be induced. I think they'd send me home and tell me to 'rest'. Ha. I can't remember what that is. All I know is I want to hold her now. I want to see her and hear her breathing, watch her chest move and look into her eyes. I'm longing for her. Grant me patience.
And the size of a small island. I'm uncomfortable, I can't sleep, I have heartburn all the time..
But I'm so incredibly grateful to be pregnant at all, to have got this far with you. I was thinking back to those dark early days when I was in a haze of worry and fear, and was worried that somehow that fear has crossed over to you and made you tense. I'm only going to think positive calm thoughts now until you're born. I'll take all of these horrible symptoms and more if you'll just be born - calm, happy and perfect.
You're so big now, but still moving all the time. You wake with a start just after I do, practise breathing in the evenings then get hiccups. You shift from one side to the other and stick your bum out just like your brother did, but always head down now. Focused, I hope, on the way out.. Sometimes you move so vigourously I worry you'll hurt yourself, or get tangled in the cord that connects us - feet and knees poking out and ripples across my stomach that amaze everyone.
The other night I couldn't sleep and found myself in your nursery, just sitting in the dark. I remember doing the same when I was pregnant with your brother - daring myself to imagine you there, in the crib, breathing and moving and smelling of newborn. Imagining myself holding you, feeding you in the night, rocking you in my arms. You're so close I can almost touch you. But suddenly I stop, not allowing myself any more imaginings... just in case.
I'm longing for you now. Really physically longing for you - I want to hold the feet that are pushing under my ribs, I want to kiss them. I want to see your face, hear your breathing next to my ear. We're ready for you.
I have 57 days until your due date. I can't decide if that's a long time or no time at all. I feel you shifting and turning all the time, a foot pressed against my ribs, a knee sticking out, an elbow digging into me. Every move makes me relieved that you're still here. I have such a fear that I won't get to hold you, that I'll somehow lose you between now and being born. Hopefully this is just ridiculous, but it's a fear that won't go away. So I'm enjoying every moment of you - just in case. I can't wait to hold you, to have you. To feel your fingers wrapped around mine, and look into your eyes and welcome you. I hope your birth comes soon and smoothly, I hope we can do it together, calmly and drug-free like your brother's. I hope I can deliver you myself in the water like your brother, that we get to spend time together just being before they take you off to be weighed and dressed.
I can't wait to introduce you to your daddy, your dog, your brother, your grandparents, your house... I want to show you the world. Stay with me.
I've taken you away for a week in the sunshine and although I thought I was doing it for me; rain-drenched and miserable from an English summer - I realise I've actually done it for you, like everything else nowadays.
I've watched you run into the mediterranean, shrieking with laughter and saltfaced, falling into the waves, losing your hat and coming up grinning with sand in your ears. I've shown you Italian tractors, ice-creams with plastic spoons, li-los in the shape of crocodiles, boats and pedalos, sand castles and swings.. Such wonders for a boy of a year and a half. You think everything is amazing. I think you're amazing - wondering again how we made you, so perfect and so here. I want to catch every moment and freeze it for later - you swimming in the baby pool with your arm-bands and frog-ring, grinning at Nonna as you dunk your plastic tractor again. You, dressed in white linen trousers and a blue checked shirt, like a Boden catalogue baby, blonde curls and blue eyes charming the Italian mamas and papas as you toddle down the main street at night, shrugging off hands and gazing in every direction at once.
Even at the table - where you look like an angel but act like a devil-child, arching your back, whingeing and shouting through over-tiredness and a surfeit of stimulation - when we have 'words' and I'm cross with you, I still think you're amazing.
Yesterday we floated out to sea, you clinging to me through the rubber rings holding you safe, and we just drifted - together and quiet, just watching the world and its wonders as I named things for you: boat, man, ball, aeroplane... Soon you'll be pushing me off, jumping off piers and into deep water on your own while I sit and watch as you take my heart with you, holding my breath. So for now I relish every second of you clinging to me, holding me as tight as I hold you. Next to my heart.
You run now, real little-boy-running, rushing to get to the other end of the room or to reach the next distraction. You are totally obsessed with tractors. It's your only real word and you use it - all the time. Still no sign of the only word I'm longing to hear - 'mummy'. I'm called 'dada' like everything else, but I get special smiles to make up for it, and sometimes arms flung around my neck with such furious passion it kind of makes up for it.
You laugh often, and smile even more. When stopped at traffic lights I turn to look at you and you catch my eye and just grin at me. It makes my day - every time. Your laugh is deep, a chuckle not a giggle - and as I write this I can hear peals of it from upstairs as daddy chases you up and down the landing before your bath. He holds the towel across the landing, matador-style, as you charge the length of the landing into it, to be wrapped up and scooped on top of daddy for a cuddle.. laughing hysterically all the while.
Things you do that amaze me:
- Feed yourself, really well, with a spoon or fork - only occasionally getting distracted and flinging your tea across the kitchen
- Drink from a straw! Why this amazes me I don't know, but it does... it seems so grown-up
- Pretend - holding a dolls cup under the plastic tap of a play kitchen and then pretending to drink from it, holding your biscuit to your favourite toy farmer's mouth and making eating noises with your tongue
- Amuse yourself for ages with a tupperware container and some water
- Chatter to yourself before you fall asleep
- Try on my shoes
- Understand almost everything I say (this one is also slightly scary...!)
I still look at you in astonishment, marvelling at how we made something so truly perfect. I want to kiss you all the time, and generally do, painfully aware that the time you'll let me do this will be short, and the time you'll push me off and tell me to stop being embarrasing will come around all too quickly. I love the weight of you in my arms, even though the space for you on my lap is getting smaller and smaller as your little brother or sister grows bigger. I imagine what it will be like to hold the two of you, my children. A strange thought. Somehow more grown-up than having one child - to have 'children'... imagine.
