A Baby’s Room
As I peek into my eighteen month old daughter’s room, I see she is still sleeping. It is midnight and her legs are already dangling off her toddler bed. It was all made up the morning before with the bed spread smoothed out and her light pink Boppy positioned perfectly so that when I laid her down to sleep after rocking her, she would feel as if I were still holding her. Now her blankets are unfolded and all her stuffed animals are on the floor, except the worn out monkey that she has carried around since she was three months old. She is oblivious to anything going on around her as she breathes in and out so soft. I can’t believe how big she has gotten. Just peering into her room brings everything back.
I can see the nightstand. It is white with everything delicately placed in its own spot. On top, I see a picture. She was just a newborn about a week old, lying in a baby doll bed. She couldn’t laugh. She couldn’t smile. She just laid there motionless with her eyes on the pacifier the photographer was dangling above her. She was all dressed up in a pink gown and her hair contained a little glue-on bow since she didn’t have enough hair for a real one. As I look back at my sleeping toddler, I see she now has enough hair to pull up in several bows.
My eyes move to the walls around the room. I see artwork posted everywhere. Two pieces in particular catch my eye. They are side by side, the same piece of art, but they were made exactly one year apart. They were handprint turkeys. The first one, I know was made when she was little. The second one I know was made just last year. I can picture my daughter dipping her hands into the paint and placing her hand on the page herself. The first one had the colors of the “turkey feathers” mixed because back then she still had the newborn reflexes and kept her hands balled up in fists. The second was more carefully thought out. My daughter chose her own colors and put her own had on the paper.
She gave it to me and with a big smile exclaimed, “Look! See!”
Seeing all these things makes me want to get out my daughter’s memory box. It is quite large by now and heavy too. I can’t believe how much we have added just since she was born. When I open the box, I dig deep so that I can start at the beginning. All of her ultrasound DVDs are still neatly stacked in the bottom. They were viewed over and over before she was born, but once she arrived there was something more appealing about watching her in real life than seeing her face on the TV. I see advice cards from my baby shower and a pile of aired out balloons from the hospital that are all labeled with messages like “Congratulations!” or “It’s a girl!” I rummage through all the old baby booties I saved and birth announcements. I come to some of the more recent things, one of which I am particularly proud of. It is a pair of my daughter’s old braces. They are made of a crème colored molding and have pink straps. They come up her leg part of the way to support her ankle and the padding on the sides are rubbed off. They are worn out from all the times they were stuffed inside her tennis shoes. I think about how far she has come, from not even being able to roll over to running around like a “wild child.”
This night is not the only night that I have done this. It is something that happens from time to time. I have nothing else I want to do but walk into the room and sit on her bed with her so that I can rub her back and listen to the quiet sound of melodic notes from the classical music surrounding me. Sometimes, if I sit for awhile, I can start to smell traces of the baby powder we once used in hopes of making her room smell like those you smell in model homes. There is nothing I could think of that is a better than the bitter sweet blessing of watching her grow up and being able to look back on what she was and see what she has become.