Dear Sam,
Happy three months old!
The weeks and months have just flown by and you've grown to be the most beautiful three month old baby in the world. Your mother might not believe it (since she tells me to spend more time with you, everyday!) but you've really started to take up a big part of my heart.
It wasn't like how it was with your sister, who just assertively forced her way into my heart, an unstoppable force of nature which swept me off my feet and overwhelmed me until I was head over heels in love with her. No, yours was a lot more subtle, a lot more quiet, but by the time I realised how much you meant to me, my love for you was already deeply rooted in my heart and completely unmovable.
OK, I'm going to take a risk and be honest here in the hope that when your sister grows up and reads this, it won't trigger any insecurities...
Where your older sister may have been one of the most challenging babies I have ever heard of and seen, you were most likely the easiest from the day you were born until today.
You didn't demand milk during the first few days while your mummy only had colostrum. Your latch was always good and your consumption matched the production of breast milk, allowing you to have been fully breastfed for the entire three months and hopefully for a lot longer.
You always slept well and from the beginning, slept more at night than in the day time. In the first month, you would only wake up twice a night for feeding (for reference, your sister woke up every 45 minutes...and still wakes up once a night on average!). By the second month onwards, you only woke up once around 5am which gave us parents a solid stretch of sleep each night.
You interact with everyone who picks you up and talks to you - you smile your amazing smile and coo back at them the whole time. You don't demand to be carried and you are content to lie down and play by yourself even from the first month unless you're hungry. If you're not hungry, you actually fall asleep by yourself, more often than not, after lying there for awhile quietly.
This is all with absolutely no conditioning or training. It's just been amazing...To put it into context, your mommy turned to me after two weeks and told me, "you know, I don't mind having another one...". Although that struck fear deep into my heart and I felt cold sweat all over, it's a testament of how wonderful you have been.
You're so much like her, you know. Gentle, quiet, and calm, where the few moments of feistiness only shows up when you're hungry...
Nowadays, when your mommy and I plan out romantic date nights, we bring you along. This is because your grandparents on both sides enjoy spending time with your sister at her current age and it doesn't strain them, but because you are breastfeeding on demand, you're extremely easy to bring out as long as your mommy's around with her breastfeeding cloth.
We'd walk around holding hands while you sleep and at no point will we feel that you disrupt any of the romance, that's how unobstrusive you are. And when we bring you out the whole day because of church ministry commitments, you get tired but don't complain at all. In contrast, your sister used to go into uncontrollable screaming and inconsolable crying when she got too tired during her first year...actually, sometimes now as well!
I'm not trying to talk bad about your sister. I love her to bits and that will never, ever change, but it's just naturally our reference point as parents because when you were not born yet, we were preparing for the same experience as the first time round and it was surprisingly as different as night and day.
I don't expect you to always be this 'perfect' but in these first three months, you have truly been as perfect as any baby can be, beyond any of our wildest hopes or expectations.
The words that were impressed on us by God was that you are "a gift" to us, and truly, you have been such a beautiful gift to this family. Your mom still worries that I will love your sister more but I am assured that both of you will continue to take hold of my heart in a way that no other human being will be able to come close to.
A lot of things may have happened this year and may still happen until the end of the year but when I think back on 2013, I have no doubt that the most significant event will be the day that God gave us such a precious gift...you.
Love,
Dad
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