Posts (page 2)

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.

Last night you woke at midnight, just crying, for no particular reason. After trying to will you back to sleep from my bed I gave in and went to pick you up. You climbed up into my arms and held my neck, pushing your face into the side of mine, bringing your knees up to your chest. You stopped crying, and I just held you and swayed. In the dark, in your room, feeling the weight of you, hearing your breath in my ear.

Your breathing slowed and I shifted you so you were lying across my arms like the tiny baby you were once. You turned your face to my chest and tried to keep your arm around me but you were too sleepy and you let it drop by my side. I could just make out your face in the darkness and I watched you sleeping in my arms, and swayed with you, in your room. I would have stayed there forever with you if I could, but what amazed me more than anything was the weight of you - you're so big now, you weigh as much as a small boy. You're not the tiny thing that I used to hold with one arm, stretching your body the length of my forearm. I wanted to keep holding you, I would have stayed, standing in your room watching you sleep in my arms all night, but you're too heavy now. I put you down slowly, and you murmured and then complained, then rolled over and kept sleeping, leaving me to go back to bed, where I lay awake for a long time thinking of how quickly you changed from baby to boy, how soon the baby days of milk and sleep disappeared, and how heavy you've become.

Well - I saw you again and you're perfect. No more shadows or scary words, no more worry - well, always worry, but no more than normal now, and a perfect heart. How lovely to know you have a perfect heart. And how strange to think that I've seen the intricate workings of your heart, bloodflow brightly coloured and pulsing, but I haven't held you. I saw your face, 3-D and beautiful, a tiny button nose like your brother's, and a yawning mouth - but I haven't heard you yet.

I feel you now everyday, thudding and flipping, and always moving. You're the first thing I think about every morning, and I wait to feel you before I truly breathe the new day. Every single tiny movement feels like love. If I believed in a god, it would feel like a blessing. I talk to you in my head all day - or just call your name. Maybe you can feel it.