9 months of Aidan

Dear Aidan,

This letter is a little late because, well, on the weekend that we were supposed to take this photo, your sleep was well and truly dreadful. Your dad and I woke up on both days looking and feeling like we were severely hungover, even though not a drop of alcohol had passed our lips the night before. You, on the other hand, were looking as fresh as a daisy and babbling like nothing had happened.

Hah! Little brat.

The truth is, this month has been awesomely exciting for you. And that means, it’s been wonderfully exhausting for us. How awesome as it been? Let us count the ways.

Earlier on, we had figured that you would probably be heading straight to walking because you were really contented with just rolling all over the floor. I kid you not. You roll, dude. Every time we try to tempt you with a toy or our iPhone to get you to crawl, you end up rolling your way like a short fat sausage to your destination.

Mmmkay. Whatever works.

We were so amused by your antics that we talked of capturing it all one of these days. But we never did. And then on the weekend that we were supposed to take your nine month photo, you started belly crawling.

Ah. That explained why you kept waking (us) up!

I was just counting the number of weeks that we haven’t had a proper night’s sleep. Starting from our Sydney holiday, it’s been EIGHT. straight weeks of interrupted sleep. (That’s EIGHT LADYBUGS, according to your Little Learning Library.) For the past eight weeks, you have either woken up multiple times in the night or refused to go back to sleep at 3am, 4am or 5am.

I’m amazed I’m still functioning.

We’re chalking it up to a bunch of reasons: the traveling, teething (none, so far), crawling, sitting up, mental leap. Man, that’s a lot of stuff going on in your baby brains. No wonder sleep is such an impossibility.

But with great mobility comes great danger. Uhhmm. Well. You see, you move so quickly that we sometimes lose track of you. One morning, after a particularly difficult night in which you took a very long time to go back to sleep and promptly took up all of my side of the bed, I ended up curled up at the foot of the bed while you slept. And, erm, you kinda rolled and fell off onto the hardwood floor.

My confession is not so much that you had fallen (let’s face it, you are a boy and you are far likelier to get into worse scrapes than falling off the bed) but that I had wanted to laugh! Oops. You see, after I had ascertained that you were fine and hadn’t broken anything, I found your crying and complaining cute. Bad mommy.

I LOVE YOU TOO!

Ooh, let’s talk about kissing. You’ve finally gotten the memo! These days, we’d say “KISS!” and you MIGHT bestow us with an open mouth. Baby kisses rock!

I love that you love me so very much. Every evening, I look forward to seeing that look of recognition flash across your face, followed by the biggest grin and some enthusiastic flapping of your limbs. It melts any fatigue or weariness that I carry on my shoulders and I become brand new all over again.

Today was exceptionally poignant. I had come out of the car and you were sitting on your nai nai’s lap. You stared at me for a split second before realising that HEY IT’S MAMA. A smile crossed your face and you tried to jump to your feet while shouting “MA MA MA MA PA PA!”

That made all the sacrifices and sleepless nights absolutely worth it.

Clearly ou adore me and you know what? I adore you more.