Sometimes I find myself racing ahead, even by decades, in life. When Pearl takes an enormous breath, the lung-filling kind an infant only uses to wail, I think of how she’ll be as a teenager. In her tiny, adorable face I can see the pain of hormonal rage 13 years down the road. One day she will say terrible things to me, things I recall saying to my own mother much to my adult shame. She may develop a routine as I did; sobbing, gulping for air, pounding deafening steps into the stairs and thundering my door shut so hard I’m sure I tested the physical structure of our house on several occasions. She will tell me I just don’t understand and she will believe it too.

Pearl Aideen

Treasure

It’s in these future moments that I know I will lovingly recall today and think it’s such a shame she’ll have lost the memory of our present by then. At four weeks old, Pearl has stolen my reality, nothing matters but her. I exist in a time warp, I lose hours and entire days. People ask what I’ve been up to, here’s a list: we have staring contests that last hours, I study her eyelashes trying to determine the science of their length, I agonize over her fingernails, I wash her hair far too often, sometimes she screams but then snuggles into my neck and promptly falls asleep to the thudding of my heart, we go on walks and she sleeps, we run errands and she sleeps, we read Game of Thrones and she sleeps, we go to bed and she is ready to party Andrew W.K. style.

He needed a little sugar & spice in his life

When I suggested to Logan that Pearl would never remember these days of total, earth-shattering love between us as she grew he scoffed and replied:

Hold onto your hat sweetheart, Pearl just got started loving you.

The beginning of a new love story

The sweetest