April 12, 2026
Dear Little Sophia,
Where did the time go?
Of course, it doesn’t make sense to ask you a question like that: you’ll read this in 18 or 14 years and you won’t feel the long gap between my posts here. You’ll just turn the page.
I posted the last of the episodes of the prologue to Letters to a Little Girl, which I called “How I Met Your Mother,” almost 13 weeks ago. You will be thirteen weeks old tomorrow, already practically potty-trained, driving, and looking at colleges.
My thoughts of finally posting about your birth on your three-month anniversary were lost in this week’s shuffle. I spend more time in bed since you were born, trying to get my 6 and three-quarters hours after an interruption or two in the wee hours, do billable legal work for most of the day, slip in work on a new venture with my partner, Gary, and occasionally exercise. A lot less exercise, I’m afraid. I’m now focused on exercises you can do around the house and in little time. Today I decided to do 100 deep squats, not all at once, of course, I’m not a barbarian, and I did them.
Meanwhile, you are in a sleep “regression,” it seems, and you now need more attention, when you’re sleepy, than ever.
I’ll explain soon enough why I think you’re not regressing overall; you’re making leaps and bounds and magic.
I’ve had no greater gift than the love and joy you have brought into my life and my relationships: with your mother, with her family, with my family, with our friends, all of them brought closer than ever because love is contagious and people do, on average, when given a chance, prefer more love. I love to watch how full of love your mother is when she looks upon you, holds you, talks to you.
* * *
I know now that I’ll never forget that I was able to witness the dawn of a new consciousness coming alive in you. We’ve watched you go from gazing toward corners of the room, looking through us, with less comprehension than a squirrel, or a lemur, unable to speak in more than a cry, to this little crinkly-eyed smiler and coo-puppy. Today may have been your first laugh. What is a laugh but several happy coos strung together?
Every day, I have been gifted with the privilege of watching you awaken more and more to your senses and your feelings, your body and your surroundings. There is nothing like the moment when you began to look at us, recognize us, and smile. That was about a month ago. “That gummy smile” was how my mother once described it on me. I had never seen anything so pure and innocent and open and vulnerable and joyful. Your eyes crinkle in the corners, any encyclopedia’s best photo to illustrate the authentic Duchenne smile, and you look like your dearest friend just showed up after a long absence.
It’s the little things. It will be the little ones I remember, all of them so pregnant with the meaning I’m giving them.
The way you spit milk back up after it’s been inside you for a good while. I call this cheese. Your mother calls it a milk glaze.
The way your mother had you eliminating in a place of her choosing by the time you were about 10 weeks old. She does not plan to let Big Diaper try to convince her that it’s normal for a human child to be soiling itself at even eighteen months.
[The way people brighten up and fall in love with life a little when you’re around. When I think of that smile, I think of the spreading of life force that we feel as the sun rises, source of all life, but in a cosmic sense, like if you could peek around the dark side of a planet and be struck by waves of light emanating from the supernova on the other side.
Well, maybe you’ll be interested to know one of my first loves was astronomy, and later cosmology. ]
I will think of your little pajama-suited body, unbearably adorable and magnetic.
I will remember how surprised I was that I’d find job satisfaction in changing your diaper. I did not know it could feel like such an act of love. It gives me great joy to keep you clean and dry and with your dignity intact, or thereabouts.
I will remember times like just now, when you suddenly sputtered with a desperate cry in your sleep and brought my attention from this writing to you hanging in a carrier on my chest, your head just a notion under the little black towel we use for mobile darkness, and I assured you everything was okay, and I’ll remember how that felt to say, even if you can’t hear me, and how feeling that every day will make me live longer and healthier and happier than I would have without you.
I have realized that it is good and right and valid to want to eat the baby.
* * *
When you’re awake I’m usually cooing at you, singing to you, or engaged in one of our call-and-response vocal trainings. That in itself feels like another small miracle, the only size we really need.
When you’re asleep, still, and we’re alone, I sometimes find myself feeling emotions well up. Love stirred with gratitude. Tears will come as I think about the very fact of you. How miraculous within my life that you came to be. Sometimes I will think of my mother, and how happy she would have been to know you, and I might feel the sadness that makes the gratitude possible, and sometimes I sing your middle name to you, Ingelein Ingelein, feeling the legacy inside me, and now inside you.
Well, in my next note I’m going to catch you up with what was going on about three months ago, in the early days of January 2026, when you were still underwater and in the dark. Your mother would sing:
Little tiny baby punchin on my guts
Punchin on my guts
Punchin on my guts
Little tiny baby punchin on my guts
Punchin on my guts all dayyy-eee
You were right on the cusp of one of the most profound miracles we can know, the transition from a bunch of cells to a being whose generous upper lip is visible in the ultrasound, and who kicks from inside a placenta like a troupe of Irish dancers, to an air-breathing humanoid with a killer smile and microexpressions that will break your heart.
