Dear Niblet (Happy 2018)

It's January 1, 2018, and I am so sorry you have the suckiest cold in the world.  But trust me, seriously, Mommy didn't want to go to that party with Dad anyway, everyone would have been drunk and annoying and I would have had to drive our tired asses home at night, and I'm 43 and my night vision sucks, and my back hurts, and curling up in bed with a trashy romance novel and falling asleep around 11 was TOTALLY the way to go this year.  I didn't lie at all when I told you that I will always be your mommy, and being your mommy includes wiping your snot and giving you tylenol and having your germ-ey self curl up next to me even when I am deathly afraid of catching whatever you have. 

I was staring at you this morning while you were sleeping and trying to breathe, and I couldn't believe I have you, that there's a gentle force in the universe that decided I should be your mother.  I mean, we all joke in our family that you have a face that belongs on a renaissance painting, which is shocking, given it's actually your Dad's goofy face, but so goes the great genetic crapshoot.  You are the reason why I am pregnant right now.  I love you so much - and shockingly I enjoy mothering you so much - that I needed to endure the indignities of pregnancy again.  The panic ridden ultrasounds, the morning sickness, the PIO injections, and now the excruciating pain of walking up a flight of stairs.... all of it is strangely attributable to the love I have for you.

You need to know and feel at your core that you have always been  - and will always be - enough.  There isn't another baby in the world to replace you or enhance you.  I used to wonder whether it was deeply fucked up that I wanted another so badly, because you are enough.  And while I used to get a kick out of imagining you as a big sister, I've never subscribed to the belief that creating siblings are a reason for procreation.  And yet, just a few short weeks away from meeting a sibling, I am excited at how excited you are at the prospect.  Because you will completely rock at this.

No, I think besides the inexplicable feeling that there is someone who has been missing from our household, there's the fact that you made it really fun to have a baby.  Now don't get all cocky, you were actually the most challenging baby in the world - the colic, the crying, the reflux, the temper, oh my god, you were not an easy baby by any stretch.   I had to wear you about 16 hours a day and we blew out a vacuum trying to satisfy your unrelenting need for white noise.  People came over to our house terrified of your colic - those screams.  Oh. My. God. And my PPD didn't help.  But your intelligence, the way you observed the world, jesus, what a trip. And I guess I must be a selfish mother, the ultimate narcissist, because I want to do it again. Despite the upheaval in our home, the craziness we are walking into willingly in our forties, the physical and emotional toll and face it the exhaustion we will all endure to keep another little human alive, here we are.

This will be a new baby, a new personality, a new set of adventures.  And I wouldn't want to embark on this adventure with anyone other than you by my side.  Nutmeg will be the luckiest sister in the world.