It struck me yesterday how secret babies are.
Bear with me while I explain my (inspired while sleep-deprived) idea.
They are just so private. My mom was over the other day, and said, "Oh, Julia! I get to see you while you're awake."
And I realized--she probably has only seen Julia a handful of times awake. And my mom has probably seen her the most out of anyone besides me, Dyami, and Lucy.
So to everyone else in the world, Julia is like a big mystery.
It's kind of like kids become more and more public the older they get. People oooh and ahhh over my two-month old when I go to the grocery store, because not only are they not that age for very long, and change so drastically while they're at it, but they're usually asleep, or have their face buried in a sling the whole time. Until a baby is about 6 months, they just aren't for public consumption.
Thinking about that made me remember that we've got this little masterpiece, this little treasure here, that only we really get to enjoy. Even our closest friends only rarely get to see her. Her flirtatious smiles, her good-natured grin at three in the morning, the tiny crook of her toes, the crud embedded in her eyelashes, the tiny butterfly shape of her ribs, the fuzzy head, the little dimply growing softness of her, the unimaginable softness.
I've said before: infancy is not my favorite childhood stage. But I'll hang with it by golly, and thank God for the privilege.
1 comment:
That makes so much sense! It makes babies all the more precious, and worth it, that all those little moments are just for the family. I remember taking K out of the sling once when she was five months old, and our friends (with whom we'd been playing weekly since she was born) were in awe. I hadn't realized that they'd hardly ever actually SEEN her in those five months. How sad that they missed all those beautiful moments, but how lucky I was to have them.
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