We survived the wedding weekend. Emily is officially married and cruising up the east coast with Ben, enjoying their honeymoon for the next two weeks. Yay!

We came home on Sunday and crashed for five hours. Slept through the entire afternoon, which also happened to be (shh!) Thumbelina’s birthday. I feel horrible that we barely even celebrated, although Topher can’t quite muster the same amount of parental guilt and keeps shrugging whenever I bring it up, saying, “but she has no concept of what a birthday actually is.” Like that makes it any better! Friday has been officially designated as Birthday Do-Over Day. I’ve been stalking eBay, trying to find a fast-ship Barney cake pan since the original one I bid on and won is “unavailable for shipment.” Grrr. The seller sent me an email saying she “couldn’t find it.” Nice.

I can’t believe my baby is two years old. I feel a little sad about her growing up, but excited about the years ahead. I often think back to my first glimpse of her, just as she was pulled from my incision and held high above my body. The tufts of gleaming ringlets, wet from the amniotic fluid, made me smile and wonder if she might resemble her papa - since his sister has very dark curls. When I eventually saw her face and spoke her name, the peering dark blue eyes turned to me with instant recognition and curiosity. The sense of belonging to one another was immediate and intense. She was so new and yet so familiar.

Topher was immediately mesmerized.

This was our first week home. We bought preemie diapers and they totally engulfed her.

Here we are at about one month old. She was just beginning to sport the old man ‘do - losing her hair on top of the head.

I get sad thinking about how there will never be another Thumbelina. It’s such an obvious statement, but when people talk about baby lust, they usually refer to having a new one. I don’t necessarily feel it for another baby (yet). I feel baby lust for Thumbelina. I wish sometimes that we could go back in time and savor those new moments, some of which were stolen from us with the drama of our birth and recovery experience. I want to go back in time and re-experience all the quirks which make her so unique. I may not have another baby who squishes her lips together in puckered concentration, or insists on being carried like Super-Girl, suspended precariously over my shoulder to maximize her ability to see the world around her. I wonder if my next baby will love nursing as much as Thumbelina and her milk addiction. Even now, as I enjoy her toddlerhood and laugh at her antics, I wonder if my next baby will insist we sing, “If you’re happy and you know it…” (shout “HOORAY!” is her favorite one right now) over and over and over and over again.

I am probably just too sentimental for my own good. Topher is always looking ahead and mentioning things we have to look forward to with Thumbelina - intelligible conversations! Soccer games! Sleeping in her own bed! Trick or treating! Roller-coaster rides! The list goes on and on, and I realize there are many fun times ahead, but I will always miss her baby days.

Here is the very first video we ever took of Thumbelina, when both of us were giddy to discover that our crappy little camera could actually record extremely low resolution video. I can’t stop giggling, Topher keeps talking in a falsetto and Thumbelina just laughs and laughs and laughs. So, enjoy. I hope she is always this happy.