Today is eight months from the day that Annie came wailing into the world—into that hospital room, into unrestrained gravity, into air, into my arms. Her eight month life has been the fastest eternity. I’ve never lived a day without her, it feels, and yet, I’ve just barely gotten my turn with her soul. 

She is an old soul. I see eons in her eyes and in the way she tenses and squeals and forces her little hands and feet, locked knees, into the world like she knows this place. Annie is here and she wants to embrace all life’s goodness. Oh, embrace it Annie! Embrace it all. And show me how to do the same.

The week Annie was born the daffodils came out in our backyard. I told everyone that my baby girl would bring Spring—and she did, nine days past her due date. The night before she was born, we celebrated nephew Clark's third birthday. I felt huge and tired and anxious. I sat against the kitchen fireplace in the family kitchen watching Clark fend off older-brother Joshua’s present-unwrapping help and I kept thinking about the little life inside of me, a life that would soon celebrate a birth day, and someday a third birthday and a thirtieth. 

Life is divine and miraculous—how else can you explain the indescribable beauty of an old soul inside a new body of small limbs that grows to be the leaps and laughs of a toddler, grows to be the love of a mother?