Our babies are twelve weeks old today. They’re now ‘real babies’, because the ‘fourth trimester’ stage is over.
Same baby, same socks. Above: two days old. Below: eight weeks old.
So many things have changed since they were born, and it’s really hard to fully ‘get.’ I look at the first few weeks of pictures and I see their scrawny limbs, and then I look at them now, chubby everything, and I just…can’t. I can’t understand how they changed so much and I missed it. I can’t forgive myself for not fully photographing them while we were in the hospital. [One of the nurses said something about how they should never be unwrapped. I took that literally and so there’s only one photo of them fully unwrapped–when they were on the warming table in the recovery room. And for pete’s sake, nothing bad would have happened if I’d unwrapped them for two minutes to snap a few photos in their bassinets or being held by one of us. What the heck was I thinking?] I can’t believe I didn’t insist that more photos be taken of me with my brand new babies–and I can’t believe that no one else thought to. I can’t believe that I didn’t take more pictures when they were newly at home. I can’t believe I don’t remember every single detail.
It’s already hard to remember them being so small. I don’t know if I can remember what it felt like to hold their tiny bodies. (I feel betrayed by my terrible memory.) I do remember the feeling of their velvety skin, especially their backs when I held them skin-to-skin. And I remember being a little heartbroken when I realized at five or six weeks that their skin felt regular, not newborn-soft anymore.
Somehow those first days each felt so long and also like they all ran together. We were all kind of in a fog, even though we didn’t feel completely and utterly exhausted. Those first two weeks seem a lifetime ago. Was that really us? Was that really them? Did that really happen?
It was around five weeks that we noticed they felt heavier. But in pictures from then, they still look pretty small. They could still fit, snugly, into the same boppy.
In the last month they’ve become little chunksters with fat rolls everywhere. Their chubby faces look almost completely different from their first month.
My whole hand is the width of their backs now–at the beginning my hand was about the size of their entire backs. Their fingernails used to be so tiny as to be practically invisible. Now they’re normal baby-sized fingernails. Their two tiny bodies used to fit comfortably on my chest, and now only one can.
It’s hard to imagine what can or will change physically in the coming months. Or how it could possibly be more drastic and emotional than these first changes that happened without me knowing. And don’t even bring up the fact that in a few more blinks, my sweet cuddly babies will be loud, smelly, surly teenagers.