Are you calling me darling?

Dear Ben,

Today you are 3 months old. Do you know that even now I find it hard to believe I am not typing “you should be 3 months old”? I still find it hard to believe our luck. I’m not sure that I ever was very good at trusting everything would generally work out for the best anyway and it is certainly proving difficult to trust the universe to leave us alone. But I’m getting better. We are all getting better. Everywhere in the house I see signs that we believe in you. Your daddy loves you, worships you and your sisters are adoring you communicating with them. I see that you’ve allowed us to love you and relax and enjoy life again. Your daddy looks 5 years younger. Your sisters smile and laugh. I am happy more often than I am sad. I don’t cry more often than I do.

I don’t think any person has ever brought more happiness than you do.

This month you threw off that fragile new baby body and started to get nicknames like ‘Tank’ and ‘Chubber’ come your way. You are bounding through weight centile lines like a boy who means to be bigger than he started out. At 12lbs 10oz you might still be petite compared to some, but you are an armful to us. You have chins and legs we can barely meet fingers around, fat covered arms that look and feel healthy and delicious. You love to reach out to the toys that hang on your car seat and kick the rings at the bottom of your baby gym. This week you found your hands well enough to use them to connect with Daddy, learned to windmill your arms (argh!) while feeding and discovered that waving these new found appendages about connects with the things and the people you can see. This week, with the help of some mummy-heart easing technology, you’ve mostly slept in your crib. You’ll have grown out of that soon too.

You like that 🙂

Daddy is trying to teach you to roll over. I tell him that when you start moving about my job is done and he has to take over 😉 But the biggest change this month is your smile. No longer fleeting and random, now you grin broadly with every sister that comes into view and when you see me, your eyes light up with love like nothing I’ve ever seen before. When I see all that love pouring out of you, I wonder how anyone can ever bear to betray that kind of trust and adoration. Of course, you bestow nearly as much love on your picture as you do on any of us, but we don’t mind that too much.

I stared at this picture all the time I was pregnant with you, when I was almost too afraid to leave my bed. I looked for a sign of hope in it, I looked for some picture or pattern that would tell me it was all going to be okay. I find it fascinating that you love it so much.

All these things, the growing in and out of 0-3 month babygros in a week or two, the being wrapped in your new sling for the first time, going on a day out to the big smoke with mummy, convincing daddy that cloth nappies are good after blasting him through a disposable – all these things are the ordinary milestones that anyone could enjoy and we know to enjoy just so much more. We won’t be seeing these little steps again and they are yours to especially treasure and remember. But the greatest thing is that 13 weeks in, over a 13rd as long as you were inside on the outside, we have you.

You stayed. It makes such a difference.