Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Memory Lane

Last night, while K read Larry Niven frantically across the room (poor man doesn't get enough downtime), Annaliese and I opened her baby book. It's not really a baby book. It's a big gorgeous and YES, turquoise blue album with orange and butterflies and big creamy pages that I bought before she was born. And so every four months or so, I order pictures off Shutterfly, fiddle with those little photo corner things, and once a year I go back and write in it. The quarterly ritual happened recently, so we're all the way up to Halloween.

Anyway.

We opened it, and she snuggled into my side, and I pointed to pictures of myself less than two years ago, standing in our old house with long hair and a big ole belly, and then there was ten-day old Annaliese, eyes open and already afire with attitude. "Baby!" she would say as we moved through the pictures, looking at her with her godparents and grandparents and aunties. "Baby Annaliese," I said back, trying to show her that that was indeed her.

I don't think she got it. And I don't blame her. Because I can't even understand it-- in the photos, she is most emphatically a BABY in February, in the picture where we're sitting on the porch of the unpainted house, and then in April, sitting on her Papa's lap on Easter morning, she's a little girl.

I hesitated on whether to start a separate book for Caspian, and I decided against it-- so many of our pictures now are the two of them. And so there's a shot of me with another big ole belly, this time in spring, and then there's a picture of K holding a very small and red Caspian against his chest. And from then on it's a mixture of them both.

It was very sweet, looking through photos with my little girl while her brother slept peacefully in the nursery.

Even though the album made me realize I was back in a bikini six months after Annaliese's birth, and Caspian's six-month birthday is in about 2 weeks, and that wasn't so fun.

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