Being a parent, as I can personally attest to now, is most certainly a full-time job, and not a 9-to-5 job but a true 24–7 job. It is the most exhausting thing I have ever done in my entire life, but now, I finally understand why parents say that it is also the most rewarding thing that you can do. As Kaia has gotten older and now that she is over 13 weeks old, she is getting more and more attentive, active, and playful. Watching her develop every single day brings me the greatest joy. It’s almost like I can feel my heart is being squeezed. She does the most quirky and cheeky things: sometimes, when I am swaddling her, she farts and I exclaim in response, she gives me a huge grin, as though she knows that what she did is stinky and silly.  Every time she smiles when I smile, my heart melts just a little bit. And last night, when I was bottle feeding her before putting her down to bed, out of nowhere, she reached her hand out to hold my pinky finger and let it stay there the entire time. And I just thought that was the cutest thing ever.

 Lately, she has been cooing and babbling nonstop during certain periods of the day when she is very awake. She particularly loves it when I am singing to her. I have captured her cooing and babbling many times, but she seems to be picking up on the fact that I am recording her on my phone. In the last two days, when I put my phone up to record her babbling and squawking, as soon as she sees my phone, she immediately stops talking. It’s as if she is saying in response, “Get that rectangle thing out of my face and let me be!“

 I suppose that is also another reminder to me that I don’t necessarily need to record and capture every single thing that she does on photo or video, but I really should be more in the moment and just enjoy her for the time and the moment itself. But I really do love sharing these photos and videos with her grandparents and some of my friends who truly adore her and look at her like a niece. At the same time, though, I want to document her growth and development. I want to be able to share these photos and videos with her when she gets older. When I was young, I always loved it when my family showed me photos and videos of me when I was a baby. Because even though I could not remember that time clearly, it was still fun to see me, myself, at a younger age. It was also fun to be able to see how others, like my cousins and brother, interacted with me as a baby. It’s almost like you are making memories of something that you don’t actually have a memory of for your child. And I really like that.