Letter to Piglet, approaching four months

I'm sadly overdue for one of these, because precisely what I feared came to pass. We muddled along, as we do, and things were more or less the same, or so it seemed. Day in, day out, it seemed like a constant challenge to stay one step ahead of the fussies and keep you entertained until the end of another day...and then one day I looked at you and realized, oh wow. You're not the wee bairn I brought home in October! 

So forgive this little lapse, little Piglet, hopefully not the first of a long litany of complaints and perceived slights that you'll recite back to me one day. For this particular one, please know that you bear no small role of responsibility in my tardiness, because you've been a most taxing little thing for the last few weeks. Somehow you went from a needy, often cranky, but also passive and sometimes amenable little creature in the first few months of your life to this BEING! With personality! Or "vinegar," as I've been calling it. No longer will you rest comfortably on the couch while mama peruses the NY Times or makes the odd phone call. All of a sudden you needed to be entertained constantly, and this was a particularly hairy situation in the couple of weeks before you were able to really focus on and understand the concept of objects outside yourself.

Thankfully we've progressed to the point where you are very skillfully reaching out and grabbing things that catch your interest: toys that dangle temptingly above your face, an outstretched finger, sometimes a big fleshy handful of mama's face. Clipping your nails on a regular basis is a matter of grave importance because if I let them go even one day too long, the pain of your digging them into my nipples when you nurse is excruuuciating. You are still not particularly interested in letting me get any sleep, today's four hour "boob nap" notwithstanding. If you can pull off an hour's nap, I'm elated (hint: it doesn't happen very often). If you can sleep for two hours straight in the night, I'm astounded. If you can do that in your own crib, well, I haven't seen it anytime recently. But we'll get there. I have to cling to that hope!

Hard as it is to believe, we're coming to the end of the days of just you and me. I've got to get back to the office in a little over a month! I've loved having you as a little sidekick, and I think that as the weeks go by you'll just ingratiate yourself further ;). But it's time, Piglet...mama needs to get back to the office, rejoining the world of the living and the litigious. I hope you'll understand in the times when it feels kind of poopy that I'm busy or distracted or stressed that no matter what, you and your future siblings and your father will always be the center of my life and absolutely indispensable to my happiness. You may not have a mother who can sew you a Halloween costume or show up for every single swim practice or help chaperone field trips (and frankly, let's face it, you should be glad for that last one...pretty sure you would be mortified at that, if you're anything like me!). But it's important to me to live as full a life as I can handle, and that to me involves work and play as well as home and hearth. I would want no less for you. 

Thank you for the family, Miss Piglet.