(Yes, I am still writing my advent posts. Christmas isn’t over yet. I’m going to take all twelve days okay? Okay.)

Fun fact: If everything goes according to plan, babies only come out of the womb because there is absolutely no more room in there. Like…none. Not even a little. If there was a little room they would stay in there because babies are not idiots. They are warm, and fed from a tube, and are much, MUCH safer in there than they are in the wild. It is a lot less work in there where everything is happening automatically and your mom even pees for you because you do not need to be bothered with such things.

But then, she gets really uncomfortable, which frankly the baby could live with, and the baby gets really uncomfortable and there is literally no more room so the kiddo comes out. During that discomfort and birthing and that next three months there is just so much waiting. So much waiting and so much wanting and so much figuring everything out.

Do you remember the early days of being in love? The like head over heels googly eyed, I know I saw you twelve hours ago but I miss you SO MUCH days of being in love? Yeah, it is amazing, and also exhuasting. I remember Christian and I confessing to each other we were relieved it was over. It is amazing, but how do you even get anything else done.

The first couple months with a baby are like that too. They call it the fourth trimester. The baby wasn’t really to come out and they depend on you, the mother to keep them alive. They depend on the fact that we will love them. Our bodies are biologically trained to fall in love with these kiddos but keeping them alive feels totally impossible, and wonderful, and terrible, and amazing.

That first three months is totally all consuming. It is completely wonderful and exhausting and you are falling in love. You with the baby, the baby with you. And it is really hard work, falling in love. It is really hard to get to know and figure each other out and know what different noises mean and how you fit together. It is hard work falling in love with a baby, learning about this tiny human that you grew inside of you and kind of already knew. Then you spend the rest of their life re-learning them.

Babies change right when you think you have it figured out, and toddlers are completely unpredictable, and then school age children come home from school and gob-smack you about once a week with something completely new and totally classically just like that child all at once.

Learning someone. Isn’t that the most loving thing we can do? Isn’t the work of our whole lives?