.
oh, asher. it's honestly hard to remember sometimes that you
actually, truly are two.
.
certainly
it's clear that you are changing and growing. every day you make me smile in wonder with your new words and new habits. of course
you are two, of course. but still, really, you are just my baby. you are
wanting and whiney and you ache and need with reckless abandon. you
still sleep next to me every night and you still wake up to nurse. you
still stir franticly to find me and you settle with my touch. you are
sweet and little and still somehow keep so much newborn-ness lingering
about you. i can't completely explain this, but baby is just a part of your aura. i see it in you and your dad sees it too; it's just there.
you are such a trying little soul, full to the brim in every
way imaginable. needless to say, my days also feel filled - with lots of patience-testing and soul wrestling moments and darker thoughts of "i never thought i'd be this mother" shouting and crying and
wondering "when will this day/this week/these hard moments end?"
i know that you ache too. you feel
so
much and too much and your little tiny heart just can't
always hold it all in.
looking back, i see now how it
has always been in you, always all along. the way you stretched your little leg inside me, reaching, reaching until finally i could grasp my hand around your footprint entirely. poking from my belly, a tiny perfect foot. a real baby foot attemping to climb his way out of my womb, fascinating. i see it too, in the way you were born. i planned a water birth all along, it's what i'd practiced over and over in my mind. but at the last minute, my midwife was still fighting uneasy feelings that i should get out of the bath. and so, as you were coming into the world, i did. you were born in bed, fighting and grasping for breath. a baby who just wanted to breathe too soon. desperate to do everything fast and first right from the very first day.
.
sometimes, amidst all the
turmoil and strife, i just get it. i get that you and i are not that different at all. and sometimes, in
the middle of the night - there's just a fleeting instant where i feel it. we're both toppling about, restless in our sleep. i pull your
head to my face. i swear you still have some of that downy newborn
hair and if i just tuck you in just right, i can still get a taste of
that intoxicating newborn smell . your arm curls under my neck and your
little baby hand twists for a fist of my hair. and we both just breathe a
momentary, miniature sigh of relief. it's not a real sigh, but it's
something.
.
and in that moment, we finally feel what we
both have been searching for all along in life - just to be loved and
cared for, for no other reason than love itself.
.
the photo shoot i had with roman 
