A Letter to My Six-Month-Old Daughter

Dear Katie,

This week you turned six months old. I can hardly believe it, but you're half a year old! As I told you the other day, I am now approximately sixty-eight times your age. In six months, I will only be almost thirty-five times your age. And in another year, I will only be about eighteen times your age. Isn't that strange? Isn't that funny? I like to tell you things like that, things that you can't possibly understand or care about; even though you don't know what I'm talking about, you look right at me and smile, and then sometimes you laugh. You have a mighty fine sense of humor already.

You have recently started to lift up your arms when you want me or your dad to pick you up. If you're sad when you do that, you usually also make that sad pouty face that you make, and we just about kill ourselves rushing over to pick you up so you'll stop making that sad face. We hate to see you sad.

Fortunately, we don't see you sad very often. You are such a happy girl. Yesterday your dad and your Aunt Stephanie came downtown with you to the place where I work, and one of the first people you saw was Ed, the head of my department. You looked at him very seriously (the way you do, as if you are assessing the person you're looking at, possibly by doing some sort of mathematical equations or scientifical calculations in your head), and then you gave him a huge grin, and you grabbed his finger and wouldn't let go. He was very impressed with you and your strong grip.

You make friends for us everywhere we go, lately. Yesterday after work, I met your Dad and your Aunt Stephanie in Marshall Fields, and as we were on our way out, you drew a crowd of appreciative store employees. They gathered around us, telling you how beautiful you were. They gawked at your chubby legs and your beaming smile and your big blue eyes, and they told us that we ought to put you in commercials. It's not the first time somebody has told us that. You are a beautiful baby.

Your days go pretty much like this. You usually wake up between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. You do some yelling to let us know that you're awake and would like to get out of your crib now, please. I get up and come over to your crib, and you smile at me happily. If you've had a really good night's sleep, you will even squeal or laugh and flail your arms when you see me. Lately you are usually on your hands and knees, practicing trying to crawl. You reach your arms up to me, and I pick you up, and I go back to bed with you, and I play with you a little bit, and then I let you nurse. You used to take a half an hour to eat your breakfast, but now you are almost always finished in less than ten minutes. You don't spit up as much, either (we'll be glad when you stop doing that every day). We visit a little bit and maybe play some peekaboo, and then I hand you over to your dad so that I can get ready to go to work. Somewhere around the time that I'm ready to go to work, you are ready for your first nap, so your dad rocks you to sleep and puts you down in your crib, where you sleep for about an hour, usually.

While you are sleeping, I leave for work. While I'm gone, your dad gives you two or three bottles, depending on how hungry you are that day. He plays with you and cuddles you and sings to you. Sometimes he puts you in your Jumperoo, which you still love, and he puts you down on the living room floor on top of a blanket so that you can practice rolling over and trying to crawl. Most of the time, the living room floor carpet is covered by your baby quilt, which is covered by your toys and one of your Boppys (the blue one, I've decided, is Senorita Boppy, and the red one is Senor Boppy). Some of your favorite toys lately are an orange rabbit that plays part of a Bach piece (which your dad has named Rarebit), a small metal mixing bowl from the kitchen, a teething ring, and the green Baby Einstein block. You like the green block better than the red or blue or yellow blocks because the green one has tags on it - you love playing with the tags on any toys that have them. Once you find them, you alternate sucking on them and flicking them back and forth with your fingers. Tags are SO COOL. 

In the afternoon, you take a nap. Your afternoon naps have just started getting longer - yesterday you delayed your dad's & Stephanie's trip downtown to meet me because you decided to nap for over two hours! We don't know exactly how long you slept, though, because after two hours and fifteen minutes, your dad went in there to check on you, and he found you wide awake, completely silent, playing happily by yourself.

Your dad is having a good time staying at home with you. At first, for about the first two months or so, he wasn't having such a good time. He was worried a lot, and you cried a lot, and some days he would call me at work and plaintively say, "when are you coming home?" But a few months ago, I asked him how he was doing, and how he was feeling about staying home with you full-time, and he said that it was good. "In fact," he said, "I think I love it." Your dad likes to throw you up in the air or to hang you upside down, and you love it. You laugh and try to fling yourself around so that he will do it again. Almost once a day lately, at some point when I am holding you or nursing you or rocking you, your dad will look over at us and say something like, "I love you both more than anything in the world." And that's how I feel about you and your dad, too. I love you both more than I can say.

A lot of times you and your dad and Molly Dog will take a walk to meet me at the el station when I come home from work, and we'll all walk home together. I am always very happy to see you - I bend down over your stroller, and say, "Hi, Katie!" and you look at me for a second with your assessing look (as if maybe you are thinking, "is that who I think it is?"), and then you smile a big relieved smile ("Oh, Mom, it's you! There you are!") If it's been awhile since your last bottle, you will sometimes get fussy a few minutes after you see me, because not only am I "Mom," I am also "FOOD SOURCE," and you are "HUNGRY BABY."

I have to admit that for now, I enjoy being both Mom and Food Source. It makes you so happy to nurse, and it makes me so happy to see you get happy. I am glad that I can give you what you need, and that breastfeeding has worked out so well for both of us. In the first few weeks after you were born, I used to see the future stretched out before me as a series of every-three-hours-for-ever feedings, and I wasn't sure I could take it. It made me a little panicky, and I didn't know if I could do it. You still eat every three or four hours, and if I'm not with you when you eat, then I'm at work pumping milk for the next time that I won't be with you, but the thought of your future meals no longer stresses me out, because it's now so easy. After all, I eat every four or five hours, too, and that thought doesn't panic me.

After we get home, you nurse, and we play together, and I try to make you laugh. Sometime around 7 or 7:30, we give you a bath, and then I give you the hee-haw*, and then we put you in your sleeper, and then we rock and you nurse a little bit more, and then we read a book (really, we read it and you try to eat it), and then it's time for bed. Sometimes you cry when it's time for bed, and we come into your room and comfort you and tell you that we love you, and before too long, you fall asleep. You usually wake up in the middle of the night (last night you woke up at 2:15), and when you do, I usually nurse you, and then you and I both go back to sleep, and we start all over again the next day.

*(The hee-haw, in case you don't remember, is when I take a blanket and flip it back and forth over you so that you get dried off after your bath. My mom and dad used to dry me off this way when I was little, and my mom remembers her parents drying her off this way, too. She mentioned it to her dad, your great-grandpa, and he said that his father used to dry him off the same way, and that he called it "the hee-haw."  So now we call it that, too.)

We took you to your pediatrician on Wednesday, and you smiled and laughed at him for possibly the first time. You weigh 23 pounds and 13 ounces, and you are 27 1/2 inches tall. You are a very big girl for your age, bigger than almost all of the other babies who are six months old. (I carried you around a lot yesterday when you came downtown, and the muscles in my left arm are a little sore today from it.) At the end of our visit, you got three shots, and you cried as if your heart were breaking. When you got the second shot, you cried so hard that you made no sound, and when you finally did make a sound, it was so loud and full of pain that it tore at my heart, too. I was holding your arms so you couldn't get in the way of the needles, and I leaned over you and kissed your head and told you, over and over, that I loved you, and that it would be ok. Five minutes after your shots, you were smiling again even though your face was still blotchy. (You seem to have inherited my pale, prone-to-blotchiness skin.)

You are healthy and strong and happy. You sit up by yourself for long periods of time. You roll over from your back onto your tummy, and you push yourself up onto your hands and knees. You do little stomach crunches when you are lying on your back - you are straining to sit up to see what's going on. You grab at everything - nothing that is within two feet of you that isn't nailed down is safe - and you put everything that you successfully grab into your mouth. Your hair is three different colors - dark on the end, light brown in the middle, and blonde at the roots. You have roots like your Mom! You still have no teeth.

You laugh and you squeal and you make weird guttural noises that sound like they would really hurt your throat, but apparently they don't. You are trying out new noises all the time now - the last few days you have been working on "bbbb," and this morning you kept clicking your tongue. You are also working on your wave - we've been waving at you lately whenever we leave or go into another room, and just as of last night, you have started to do something that looks like you're trying to wave back. So far it looks more like you're trying to quickly fling your whole arm toward me, but we think that before too long, you will figure out how to make it look more like a wave. You're very smart, we can tell.

One day a couple of weeks ago, you and I shared our first laughing fit. We were sitting on the bed, and you were on my lap, facing me, and something I did made you laugh, so I started to laugh, too. My laugh made you laugh some more, which made me laugh some more, and it went on and on like that, the two of us laughing and laughing, with less and less time between each laugh, until we were just sitting there, smiling at each other, laughing at our own laughter. We laughed so long that my belly hurt from it, and later I thought that hopefully that would be the first of many times (countless times) that you and I laugh together until our bellies hurt from laughing.

I told you this the other day, but I should tell you again now, because I know you won't remember what I said (and you don't understand the words yet anyway): I love you. I will always love you. Your smile will always make me happy. I promise.

And so, when you were six months old, this is how it is, and this is how I feel. You are beautiful and wonderful and amazing and perfect.

Love,
Mom

P.S. Well, perfect except for the other night when you woke up at least 13 times in the night. That wasn't so perfect. In fact, that was the opposite of perfect, and headed down the spectrum toward hell. But we don't need to talk about that, because that is never happening again, right?  Right.  Of course not.  Ok, then. 

Comments

[Donna]

This just made my day! I was surfing the net for some info about how much my six-month old should be sleeping (even though babies never know what they "should" be doing)and your letter popped up. Katie at six months is so much like Caleb, even down to their lengths and weights! I wish I could write him a letter as lovely as yours -- maybe I'll just plagiarize it :-) Six months is such a wonderful age. I wish I could keep him this way forever, and yet I'm so looking forward to all his growing up. Being a mom is the most awesome thing I've ever done or will ever do in my life.

Donna

[Chrissy]

This is a beautiful letter to your daughter, I too have a six month old daughter and she is perfect, she is wonderful and in every way and this letter just touched my heart. Your little girl is precious, and I too cant believe how fast the time goes by.
Chrissy