tiny moments with tiny babies

Every night, when I give my infant baby girl her last bottle and I’m about to lay her down to sleep for the night, I hold her bald, fuzzy haired head close to mine and inhale deeply. I breathe in as much as I can, and I feel the wispy little hairs on her head dance as the edge of my nose sniffs her scalp. I try to memorize exactly how she smells and hold on to it, though we all know there is no way to adequately describe how a 3 month old baby smells. I just know I want to sniff and smell her all night if I could (and somehow forego my body’s need for sleep) because I know that she won’t smell like this forever.

Thanks to her two older brothers, a 5 year old and 3 year old, and how they're getting bigger (and smellier) by the second, it’s hard to remember a time when I sat and cuddled and sniffed their heads when they were only a few months old. That’s the worst part about this: the fleetingness of it all.

Those first few months when babies need us so much because they can’t do anything for themselves, yet they’re so fragile, tiny, and perfect throughout. While we as parents are so clueless as to how to get through the sleepless nights, vaccinations, first colds, introducing solids, colic, spit up, 42 weekly trips to the pediatrician's office, and if they're the baby of the house, like my baby girl is, we also throw in helping the older siblings with homework, stopping fights between them, giving them their own one on one time, and desperately trying to keep up with whatever else they need to grow and thrive as tiny human beings, on a daily basis.

Then one day? It’s all gone.

These first few months when your babies are literally that, babies, fly by so quickly that it’s hard to remember what they smelled like, what they looked like, how they laughed at a silly game of peekaboo, the sound of their cries, how they smiled while they slept - it all fades in our memory and is somehow replaced by other memories of our kids as they are now or just a few months ago. Maybe our brains are so wrecked as exhausted, overworked, and stressed-out parents, trying to handle so much at once, that we can only retain a few random moments that especially stick out in our memories for some reason (perhaps because it was particularly funny or particular unpleasant). I only remember the boys being this small (as small as my baby girl is right now) from the pictures I look at NOW of them as infants but independent of those pictures, I can’t remember seeing them with my own eyes when they were that small. And that breaks my heart.

And maybe, in a couple of years, I won’t remember my baby girl being this small, and I will have to look at pictures of her at this stage to jog my memory and force myself to remember some random moment of her laughing in the bathtub with me - I hope I’m lucky enough to remember even that!

That might be the most heartbreaking part of it all. If our memory is so fleeting and careless of such precious moments like smelling our tiny babies while we rock them to sleep, despite how special those memories are, then how will we remember these moments when our babies are fully grown adults who don’t need us anymore, not even to help with their homework or ask for our input about the really BIG decisions.

Will they ever know how much we savored these tiny moments of their childhood? I don’t think they will.

At least not until they have children of their own and then they can sit in a rocking chair in the middle of the night, sniff their tiny baby’s head, and think, "did my mom ever do this with me when I was a baby?"

Well, I really hope they know that I did.