Happy Birthday Bubs!

Dear Bubs,

This time two years ago I was 11 hours into a 22-hour labour that ended with the birth of the most beautiful, terrifying thing I’d ever seen – you.  Which means that tomorrow, you will be two whole years old.

From those hazy newborn days when we were convinced you’d turn out physically or emotionally scarred owing to our parental ineptitude, we have all emerged relatively unscathed.  We have had the pleasure of watching you grow from a tiny, snuggly baby into a beautiful, intelligent and witty little boy.  You make us laugh every single day.  Many times, you have been our reason for getting up in the morning.  You have bound us together when circumstance tried to pull us asunder.  You have taught us so much about patience, about gratitude, and about love.

At two years old, you have no comprehension of any of these things.  You approach each day intrepid, innocent and joyful, taking pleasure in the simplest things and pausing to notice the smallest minutiae of the world – a bug, a leaf, a blob of mud on your trouser leg.  You are full of mischief, like all little boys should be.  You absorb knowledge like a sponge, storing up snippets of information and regurgitating them at will, leaving us agog and often in hysterics at the wise head that already sits atop your tiny shoulders.  You are perfect and pure and I wish I could preserve your two-year-old-ness forever, to show you when you are older and have forgotten what it means to live precisely in the moment, never thinking ahead or looking behind, worrying only about whether you can fit another coin into the latch of the door or whether I will notice you pinching raisins from the cupboard.

But much as I would like to, we can’t freeze time and so maybe this entry will be enough; maybe when you are bigger you will read it and know that at two years old you were, are, and always will be the love of our lives.  Happy birthday sweetheart.

Love forever and ever

Mummy x