12/15/2025
There’s a specific kind of beautiful exhaustion that only exists in the first few weeks.
Sleep? You used to know her. A hot meal feels like a distant memory. What your body has become is foreign and yet, home. A home, made recently vacant and also, now, more full than ever.
It’s a weird thing, right? To BE someone’s only home and then for them to become a living monument, a living definition of “home” from that moment forward.
In the first few weeks, there’s a lot of forgiveness. In the quiet moments where you realize you were short with your spouse, your mom, yourself. Forgiving yourself will become one of the best and most important tools you could ever hone because...being a parent means showing up, imperfect, but fully. And then asking yourself and those you love for forgiveness when your best fell a little short.
Ironically, it’s also going to mean forgiving yourself for the times you thought you weren’t enough and you absolutely were. Forgiving yourself for not believing in yourself is wild.
The first two weeks...everything is new. It’s far from perfect, and in the quiet moments it fools you, exactly as it is supposed to, into believing that things actually are, perfect...and that’s true, really.
You’ll think of all the things you wish were different, the things you want life to be for the littlest version of the biggest love you could imagine. And even in the longing while you stare at them...in the quiet...you don’t need anything else, not really.
Everyone who comes to visit will tell you to “soak it up” because it is going to “go by way too fast” and you’ll sigh...your cells recoiling from the advice you’ve heard, steadily for 9 months and two weeks.
But you already know...you know they’ve been right all along.
Two weeks?! ALREADY?!
And suddenly they’re ten.
So. We took the pictures. To hold onto what we knew we’d forget.
