Little Fi

What Fiona loves best is when, after her tub, I let her climb up with me into our sleigh bed and nurse her while she's bare naked, lying down.

Fiona slept with me every night of her life until she was nine months old, you'll recall. She was the snuggliest, coziest, most delicious little baby to snooze with until suddenly she wasn't. Suddenly she was a wretched bedmate, thrashing and moaning, nursing and ripping the nipple out of her mouth in frustration, only settling when I would jump out of the bed in utter despair, not knowing how to soothe her. It took me a few weeks to put two and two together and realize that this child craved space, and she's slept very happily in her crib ever since (albeit not through the night until the dawn of the ever-so-ingenious nightlight).

So, to snuggle with her cozied against me, naked to boot, is simply a delight.

She's so tiny, Fiona is, she's almost two but she's just over 20 pounds and just petite all over. She has this fluffy head of baby curls that are getting quite long and she's so wiry and strong and amazing to lie with. She still absolutely loves to nurse and I love to nurse her. It's such a sweet, quiet way to love each other.

Lately when we're nursing in bed after her bath, she's taken to gazing upward at the photoframe above the bed with all the photos of Charlotte in it. She knows it's Charlotte, but obviously can't understand who Charlotte is, or what happened to her. Her comments vary, and I don't even really try to rationally explain it to her because I know she's too little.

"Charlotte's asleep."

"Charlotte's sad."

"Charlotte's nursing."

"Charlotte wake up. Mimi have bandaid."

"Charlotte happy."

Once, a while back, before I had specifically identified the photos over our bed as Charlotte, she thought they were photos of me holding a dolly. At that point she probably thought Charlotte was a candle we lit on our dining room table, as her context was "Let's light Charlotte's candle".

It's funny for me to compare her knowledge of Charlotte at this point to Liam's when he was her age. When Liam was a baby, and it was just the two of us, I told him the story of Charlotte over, and over, and over. It was like a book we read, the story of the mother and father who wanted their baby but she died, and then they had this amazing little boy to bring joy back into their lives. His information about Charlotte was her story over and over again. Fiona has probably never even gotten the whole story, all laid out in a straight line like that. She gets whispers of it in her ear, she gets photographs all over the house that everyone in the family refers to and tells her it's Charlotte. She has everyone going around saying their wish for Charlotte before we eat. She even chips in now, saying, "We love you, Charlotte, we miss you," and I'm sure she wonders who it is she's talking to. When Fiona was tiny I was having such awful PTSD (if I may call it that) that I could barely think about Charlotte let alone tell her story out loud to the baby in my lap who lived.

I feel like I should make her a book about our family, explaining who everyone was, who came first, who came next. There's just so darn many of us now.

And I love it.