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Four months and chubby!

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“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don’t mean a thing.” – Toni Morrison

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My beautiful daughters.

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A friend of mine recently said she loves it when babies are half in this world and half in the last one, the one they came from. This baby, this ocean soul, smiles at trees and ceilings, as though she is still connected to roots that are otherworldly. I have known since she was just a quick bump and nudge in my belly that she is extraordinary, and I told that same friend some months ago that I wouldn't be surprised if this baby was born with a secret. She came into this world still encapsulated in the bag of waters, wrapped in the salt that protected her for so long. Now, she is vibrantly alert, and my friends babies who were born at the same time seem so sleepy and lazy compared to her. She is so sharp, and so curious, and tries so hard to communicate. I wonder if she's trying to tell her secret, or trying to get all of us to tell her ours.

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This bright-eyed little soul weighs 8 lbs. 10 oz. and will be 7 weeks old tomorrow. The time has flown, but at the same time, I can't imagine a world without her, as though she has been part of us forever. We're lucky she chose us.

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Since she sweats like Chris Farley, we take a lot of baths. ❤️

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What up, 6 weeks? Beautiful starry-eyed baby has been eating 24/7, smiling a lot (especially at patterned ceilings and windy trees), spitting up and cultivating multiple chins. She's awesome. And possibly over 8 lbs now? Unsure. I've been doing so much iphoneography as this tiny faery is not really open to the idea of being a separate being yet, and screams when she's put down. But I had her newborn photos taken by Amy McDaniel at Dewdrops Photography and I can't wait to see them.

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Kai Lana ❤️❤️ Five weeks old, 7 lbs 12 oz

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Hapa Love

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South Carolina

Hazy morning wander in our new home.

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Beautiful creatures: My two daughters, ages 17 years and 3.5 weeks.

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Progress! No screaming during hair-washing time. This beautiful ocean soul is 7 lbs 4 oz as of yesterday, and nursing so much better now. We are so in love.

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The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. - Yeats

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Real Talk It's 2:34 am and I'm awake and exhausted and still sore everywhere and my house is a disaster and I still look pregnant and my boobs will literally never be the same again and I'm sleeping on the couch so my noisy baby doesn't wake her sister and I just remembered some fish I bought a week ago and never cooked because my brains are fried from sleep deprivation and a constant focus on what my baby is eating instead of what I am and somehow in seventeen years I managed to forget how fucking hard these first few weeks are. But I get to share these dimly-lit moments with a new person and her old soul and she still smells like that thing there's no word for but might just be the wind of some other world and just now when she latched on to nurse it didn't feel like razor blades and I love holding her tiny hands while she eats and running my fingers through her feathery black hair and wondering what she will be when she is twenty years old instead of twenty days old and when she's milk drunk and limboing between sleep and wakefulness she smiles with the biggest dimples and her long lashes fan out across her cheeks and I can't believe how fucking miraculous it is that she chose me and I get not one but two perfect girls to kick around earthside with.

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Sister Girls Seventeen years and some months ago, I was a sixteen year old girl with a brand new baby in my arms. I was entirely in love, bound to her heart and soul, and even though the timing wasn't ideal, I knew our journey would be perfection, that great things were charted for the both of us. We traveled the world together, lived every day out loud, loved so intensely and shared an awe at absolutely everything we were blessed to experience together, from breakfast with humpback whales to international gymnastics meets attended and won. We were a two-woman team, arms and hearts open to anything. I always planned on having a lot of children, many babies in a row. This wasn't my destiny. Instead, I had a wild life lived with Maria by my side and a closely kept promise to someday have more babies, when the time was right. Now we have Kai. Kai is seventeen days old, six pounds and fifteen ounces today, struggling with breastfeeding, quick on the trigger with a feisty temper and a full head of hair. She's a wild woman, a water child, born in the amniotic sac in the bathtub a week before her due date on the stormiest day. She is so many things Maria is not. My sweet 17-year-old girl and my sweet 17-day-old girl couldn't possibly be more different, and going from a family of two to a family of three has been a big adjustment for Maria, who is so accustomed to being the center of our whole world. It's been harder than either of us could've imagined, because I've been bedridden in the wake of a placental abruption and a massive blood loss. I haven't been able to drive her everywhere or sit up late with her laughing or hug her as tight as I used to. These are the wonder weeks, these first few weeks with a new baby, but they're also the hardest ones. I tell Maria that I love her, that things won't always be this way, that Kai will learn to eat and sleep and that we will find a new normal. And even though there have been tears from all of us, I think she believes me. And I know my second daughter is so blessed to be loved by my first. Life is lovely.

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Waking up in wonderment with galaxies in her grey eyes.

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Tiny Kai's morning bath. All photos by her big sister, Maria. ❤️