The birthday letter

"Dear D,
My precious girl, you are no longer a baby, and not even a toddler anymore, but a little girl..."

Somehow, as of Sunday, I'll have a three-year-old kid. It doesn't seem so long ago that I found myself hanging out with a newborn all day, every day. The day that D was born, I wrote her a letter telling her about how we had hoped and planned for her, how we told people about her, what she was like before she was born, etc. And every year since, I write her a letter for her birthday, detailing the events, milestones and memories of the previous year. It takes awhile to do, and it's a bit of an emotional process, but I really hope I can keep it up. For one thing, it's nice to have that to look back on, and see not only the progress from year to year, but the snapshots in time of what her tastes were in a given period. But beyond that, I know that she'll love to read these when she's older.

It's so easy to forget what she was like as a baby, and as a toddler, especially when we spend all day together and change comes so gradually. The days are long but the years are short. So in these rapid years, I take a few evenings near her birthday and write to her about how she has grown and changed and surprised me and made me proud over the most recent year of her life. This kid absolutely astounds me, and I am so blessed to have her in my life.

PS M gets the same deal; I wrote her a letter on her birth day, and I still have a few weeks left to write her next one.