Your fever breaks mid-morning and by your evening bath you pull yourself to standing by yourself for the first time. So we’re doing okay, baby girl.
Your wide smile when you plant your feet and hold onto the tub edge to look me in the eyes is brilliant. You had a dim, tired look earlier today but your brightness is back as you decide to hit a milestone on the slipperiest surface possible. I help you to sit when you get wobbly and you start to try again but give up halfway through and fall back to bump your head on the baby tub rim. Gently. You cry for fifteen seconds and then happily continue your bath, getting in all sorts of weird contortions in the water that remind me I need to figure out swimming lessons this spring.
(I hear you now, as I write. Forty minutes after bedtime and you’re stirring and whining. Let’s see if you go back to sleep.)
(You do go back to sleep. I turn over in bed to glance at the monitor and see you’ve flipped from stomach to side and have one hand sticking outside the crib. Oh, there you go back on your stomach again.)
(Oh god, I need to lower your crib mattress. You can pull to stand now.)
You’re still a snotty mess today with red cheeks and a tired brow but hopefully you’ll be on the mend this week. My throat starts to itch with a cough this evening and I look at you pointedly while we have breakfast for dinner, recalling how my shirt has been your favorite Kleenex this week. And how, hours earlier, you coughed in my open mouth. You keep eating your eggs, unperturbed.
Love,
Mama