She hums, eyes closed and rapidly nursing, a fiddly hand tugging at the heart charm on my necklace for a moment before switching to stroking the skin over my collarbone and then kneading slowly at my breast like a kitten. Her humming stills and her nursing slows, her hand relaxes and her body melts into a nap briefly resisted.

Funny little pigtails, tiny feet with the soles starting to toughen from all her attempts at walking. Polka-dotted ladybug dress from when she was a newborn, now a little shirt to wear over jeans. I remember my first child at this age. He seemed impossibly huge compared to his newborn self. My daughter, my third child, seems both huge in comparison to when she was first born into my arms.. And tiny in comparison to her brothers.

I get to savor her being tiny for longer, and it’s still too short a time. Why would I rush this? Sometimes when I’m impatient I do wish for it to pass more quickly. I do wish for sleep. But already I am sleeping longer. Already she is peeling away for her own space.

These last days are like the warm days at the end of a long hot summer that seemed endless but that is rapidly turning into a colder fall. I’m in that time in-between where I can be happy for the slowing of time and where I can blissfully breathe in these last few days of an infancy that so rapidly passes.

I can take the time to memorize the sweet milky smell of her breath.

I can take the time to kiss the baby-soft down of her hair.

I can take the time to hold the little hands with their pudgy dimpled fingers.

I can lay next to her for a few more precious moments that simply will never exist again.

These last signs of babyhood live in the moments between sleep, as during the day she is so constantly on the go and undeniably a toddler more than a baby.

These moments as she fights a nap or fights her sleep, far from being moments that should be met with resistance of my own.. Are a gift. A last clear chance to memorize these moments so rapidly fading.

♥