Letter to Lucia: One Month

Little Lucia,

You’re four weeks old today. It’s hard to believe we’ve had you for such a short amount of time—it feels like you’ve been with us forever. I’m still amazed that it was you in my belly for all those months, that it was your precious little feet I felt kicking me in the side. In the first ultrasound picture we had of you, you were waving—a gesture you still make quite regularly. It’s hard to fully grasp that the nine months I spent pregnant this year were all leading up to you.

You’ve changed a lot in just one month. You’ve gained a pound and a half—maybe more by now—and your cheeks, legs, and arms are all getting a little chubbier, a little sturdier. I can see the difference in your feet and hands. You don’t look quite so new and fragile anymore. You had a personality from the moment you were born, but it’s becoming stronger now. You set your lips firmly together when you don’t like something; your whole face crumples heart-breakingly when you’re upset. When you’re relaxed and happy, looking up at our faces, you have an adorable way of pursing your lips and making them into a startled “O,” as though you’re making the call of a ghost or an owl. You prefer to sleep in our arms, or in the well of the Boppy on our laps, than anywhere else, though we’ve set up a variety of “sleep stations” throughout the house so you’re never far from us while you’re napping.

We love you all the time. But you frustrate us sometimes, too, when you wake up at ungodly hours and stare up at us with bright, wide-open little bird eyes, sleep the furthest thing from your mind. You have your fussy times, when your cry suggests that nothing in the world has ever been more horrible than whatever you’re currently going through, and that no people have ever been more useless in making things better than your daddy and I.

I get teary when I wonder if you’re homesick for the womb. It seems like you are, sometimes. You love the white noise of the “wind” sound on my alarm clock; you love the sound of the washer and the drier and the endless shushing we do to calm you down. You love to be jiggled and rocked and swayed. You like being swaddled (though you always manage to get an arm free, like a little Houdini). These things comfort you. It must be so shocking, sometimes, to be out here in the world, away from the dark, safe home you were so used to. And it breaks my heart to know you can never go back there. I hope we can make you feel as happy and safe here with us as you felt then.

I don’t want this infant time to go by too fast. But at the same time, I’m relieved that the first couple of weeks have passed, those weeks when we were still reeling from the birth and the fear that went along with it. It’s nice to be past all that and on to the regular day-to-day of feeding, changing, soothing, getting to know you, now that we’re one month in.