Before I forget...

Ten weeks and three days have passed since Aida Orleans came into this world. There are things I haven't written, things I should have jotted down, memories that are already slipping into the recesses of my mind that if I don't write now will disappear forever in this cloud of sleep deprivation.

For the first couple of weeks, I took meticulous notes about her eating, pooping and sleeping habits. Obviously, I wanted to be sure she was eating enough, sleeping enough, pooping and peeing enough. I needed to know she would survive.

But here are some things I didn't write, and should have:

When she stretches after a long sleep, she raises her eyebrows, but keeps her eyes closed and moves her face in a manner that reminds me of a drunken old man.


At the upper tip of her outer ears is a little explosion of tiny hairs. My mom says I had the same thing on my ears when I was born. And all this time, I figured it meant I was kinda ugly. Now I know how heartbreakingly adorable it is. I love those hairs.

In the first few days of her life, her skin peeled. Each day, it seemed, a different area of her face was afflicted with a dry or pink patch where the skin had rubbed off. Like a lot of things with babies, one day it was just gone. Then, around the ninth day, poor thing had pimples. Baby acne, they call it. Of course, I worried it was my fault, the legacy of my bad skin...Aida, darlin, your mom has adult acne. We go together. But, thank God,  just like before, it disappeared.

From the start, she was mesmerized by the slats in our headboard and the unmoving ceiling fan, staring endlessly at them as we tried to get her attention. When we started using the changing table, she was flabbergasted by the slats there, too.

On Aida's one-week birthday, her umbilical cord came off. That same day, she took her first sleep in her crib. I worried about not hearing her when she cried. I worried that a car would run off the road and into our house, plowing through her crib. I worried she would think we didn't love her.

By one month, she started making a sound like laughter. A light chuckle and a smile. She mostly laughed at the flowers on her bouncy chair. But she responded to my voice, too. At two months now, she makes the same sound with more feeling and with a bigger smile. Things that make her laugh include: breastfeeding, Pat the Bunny, bath time, gas, the pink and blue toys that hang down from her play gym, me kissing her over and over on her cheeks, diaper changes.

She hated her first bath. Shivered and cried as I attempted a sponge bath so as not to disturb her umbilical cord or her newborn skin. Now, it is my favorite part of every day with her. She arches her back when I first lower her into the warm water. No matter how long her day has been and how tired I know she is, she calms down, stares up at me and opens and closes her mouth while we talk about her toes, the fold in her neck (where, I tell her, she could keep her money), her belly, her hair.

Just after we got home from spending Christmas in Louisiana, Aida discovered the butterfly mobile I made for her before she was born. The way her hands pumped with joy as she eyed the spinning calico creatures made me cry the first time I saw it.