Amazing

This month that I watch you race around the floor, I think about the life you have lived so far.  7 months of beautiful, shocking growth.  I remember the moment the doctors picked you up, seconds after you left Mom’s body.  You breathed and you cried with no delay and I felt a relief I have never felt in my life.  You were here.  You had safely arrived.  

Everything you do is impressive to me and I think an objective observer would have to admit the same.  It was so cool how you ate at your Mom’s breast with no one teaching you what to do.  God blessed this whole system of life and birth so that you would survive with almost no knowledge of the world.  

The first moment I held you was unique among all time.  I was exhausted from the fear and the wait of the all night birth.  Mom was momentarily half-asleep from the efforts of bringing you to your own physical space on the planet.  You were covered in all sorts of greases and fluids that would usually make someone’s stomach spin, and I was as happy as a man could be holding you against my chest.  

In the shock of everything that had happened, and the shame of being a foreigner in a far off world, I tried to speak to you in the language of our new home.  But I quickly gave up and celebrated you with the language I knew.  And as you heard me speak it seemed to me that you knew my voice.  Everything you do is impressive.

Mom held you day and night as you learned to know us better and better.  The doctors made sure you could hear.  They ran routine tests to make sure you were on track to live a healthy life.  They gave you the weirdest bath ever under the faucet of a hospital sink and told us not to copy them at home.  We spent those days in shock and awe, trying to sleep and staring at the amazing you.  

Family came to celebrate your life, from across the city and across the ocean.  Everybody loves to see you.  As you cry, as you laugh, as you show your two little teeth.  As you vocalize nonsense syllables and you reach out to the loved ones around you.  As you shake your toys and eat your vegetables.  You melt our hearts every day.  Everything you do is amazing.