My dearest little one:
Life isn’t fair, is it? Here we’ve spent hours and days writing odes of love to your sister, and all we’ve given you are some lousy “moment of cuteness” photo posts! I think this brief Emmett update is long overdue.
You are 5.5 months old now. How did that happen? Seriously–how? I feel like I JUST had you a couple of weeks ago, but suddenly you are double your birth weight and sporting a teeny, tiny tooth that decided to emerge during the height of our H1N1 Fun Fest 2009. You can roll over from front to back and back to front–and you can push up on your hands and hoist your little butt in the air. It’s pretty obvious that we better babyproof the house much sooner than we did for your sister because this boy? He’s going to crawl, damn it!
You have the greatest sense of humor, Emmett, and you’ll laugh at your sister’s ridiculous antics, no matter how annoying they might seem to anyone else. She’ll be all up in your face, chanting nonsense and manically tossing her hair from side to side, and you’ll give her a darling grin before jamming your fist into your mouth.
Speaking of your mouth, you want to put EVERYTHING in it! The phone? Looks tasty! Sister’s shirt? Let’s eat it! The napkin on the table? Let’s sample that delicacy! We definitely have to police what we leave within your reach now. You use those cute little fingers of yours to tug on my hair whenever you’re nursing, and you love it when I clap your hands together and sing to you.
Though you’re not sitting up yet, you can be propped, and your favorite mode of transport seems to involve walking around with your daddy, facing outward in the Baby Bjorn. You’ve even fallen asleep in this position–and I find myself marveling at the beauty of my two guys joined together like that.
Despite your recent misery from flu and teething, you remain my sunny, sweet-tempered, laid-back boy–full of a joy and openness that still shocks me into abject gratitude every day. Lately, I’ve been thinking back to last November, when your dad and I learned, through a first trimester screening, that you had a 1 in 39 chance of being born with Down Syndrome. During those horrible few weeks of not knowing, and waiting to do the amniocentesis, I could hardly sleep or eat. When the call came from the genetic counselors, I literally fell to my knees, sobbing into the phone with relief.
Recently, I took out that envelope with the amnio results and looked at your DNA profile, thinking about what a tiny alteration in that swirling helix might have meant for us now. As I pondered the “what ifs” and “could have beens,” I recalled seeing you on one your earliest ultrasounds. Your arms and legs were wiggling like crazy, and your heart was a tiny pulse of light on the screen. I remember thinking, as I watched your heart beating, “Oh, there you are . . . there you are, little one. And your heart will always be mine.”
I love you, baby brudder. With every pulse of my heart, I love you.