In truth, I miss many things about our pre-pandemic life. You’ve never gotten to know how it feels like to sit on a swing or go down a slide. You haven’t been on an airplane to to marvel at the sights and smells of somewhere far away from home. Your first birthday is coming up, and we won’t be able to give you the big fanfare celebration traditional in our culture. I know you won’t remember back to this age when you’ve grown enough to retain memory, but I still mourn these experiences being lost to you.
In carefree fashion, you enjoy sleeping the day away, are fascinated by the softness of flower petals, and marvel at the way sunlight gets filtered through our blinds and dances with shadows.
You examine any object you could get your hands on, and you are interested in repetitive gestures like Daddy’s coffee grinder.
You like watching Odin; you especially revel in tossing your finger foods down from your high chair and watching him gobble it up.
You learn more gestures, like rotating your hand for “no more,” shaking your head “no,” and pushing food away when you’ve had enough. You develop a fondness for bread and get a kick out of playing peek-a-boo.
You love Luc just about as much as you love picking a fight with him over toys, and you take turns sleeping on each other’s heads, clamoring for the upper hand.
We start reaping the results of the labors in our garden: we harvest the potatoes that we planted at the start of shelter-in-place, and we watch our baby plants grow tall. The summer flowers bloom as we continue to cook and bake to pass the time.
As the world gradually reopens, we take little strolls around downtown Willow Glen and Santana Row so you could marvel at small joys like water fountains.
We cannot give you much else these days but hope that you will retain your infant optimism, and that nothing can dampen the joy in your heart and your sense of curiosity for the world.
