Here’s to 200 days on Earth!
My darling Baobao,
One thing that just about everyone — at least, every parent — I’ve told about you has told me the same thing: Cherish these moments; they go so fast!
And my god it is true! What else is true, maybe because I have been trying to pay attention, to cherish these moments, is that the past (more than) six months have also been the longest I have experienced since I was still a teenager, when summers still lasted twice as long as the calendar claimed.
In 200 days, you have almost doubled in height and weight. You have learned to roll over and are working on crawling (and when we’re not looking, you manage to move all over your crib. Somehow).
You have learned to smile and laugh, and to look for eye-contact (I don’t dare look in your crib in the morning if I want to pee first – and when don’t I want to pee first?). You’ve started to use crying for conscious communication, and you’ve begun to practice your vocalizations big time!
Despite your sometimes impatient tears, I think I am starting to be able to see something of the personality you will develop as time goes by. (I am one of those, yes, who believes an awful lot of the person you will become is written in your genes.)
You read it here first: Daddy Zesser predicts you will be a pretty phlegmatic person, with a quiet, sardonic sense of humour and a pretty good dose of patience — until you snap.
Meanwhile, and whether time will prove my predictions right or wrong, your ever-growing sense of self and your nascent understanding that your mother and I are individuals, separate from your own self. (Well, I think you are showing signs of that realization, but when I think about it, I can’t point to any specifics that would prove it. Soon, though …)
I know, celebrating 200 days on earth is an utterly arbitrary thing to do, but I think you’ll find that we human beings like round numbers, even when we know that there is absolutely nothing actually nothing about the number 200 that is any more special than 199 or 201.
It’s just the way we roll.
So happy 200th days, my darling girl! You’ll get another one of these irrational notes on Day 300 — and many, many days in between!
I love you,
Daddy