So you want to know what a moment of bliss looks like?

Baby E is cutting about four teeth at once. This means we have a very cranky baby on our hands. She’s stopped up, covered in drool, and overall just pretty unhappy. The last three nights she has woken up several times during the night – last night I swear after 2 am the girl didn’t sleep at all. Neither did we. And I’m pretty unhappy when I don’t get my sleep.

Tonight, hoping to beat this teething monster off at the pass, we plugged a Vicks plug-in into the wall, dosed her up with Motrin, and for the first time since she was a few days old, I rocked her to sleep.

A moment of bliss.

Her chubby little arms, busy as always, grew limp and her labored breathing evened out. Her long lashes skimmed the bottoms of her eyelids. And my mind went back to our apartment in Chicago: 1500 square feet of pure chaos, no room in the inn. Breastfeeding in the living room with absolutely no privacy. Falling asleep with her tiny body propped up in the crook of my neck, knowing that the next feeding was only 2 hours away…if I was lucky.

5 pounds, 8 ounces of pure love.

The first year of your child’s life really is a miraculous and crazy thing. I feel like I’ve blinked and now all of a sudden her shock of almost black hair has softened to cornsilk and her tiny body has grown into a chubby, chatty, smiley, almost crawling (!) 10 month old. How did this happen?

You spend 9 months wondering what this person will be like and waiting to meet them. If you’re impatient like me, you find out if it’s a boy or a girl so you can plan and buy and celebrate a little early. And no matter how hard your delivery and early days with a newborn are (and I know, for me they were really hard the second time around), given a little distance and a little perspective…well, you realize that you just might be a better mother, wife, friend, person because of it. And you wish you could give it another try. This time, with a little more knowledge and a little more heart.

A moment of bliss that reminds me how precious life is and how thankful I am for my two girls. Knit together by my Father, they were always there, waiting to be named and loved and rocked to sleep.