It’s crazy to think that today, Kaia is three years, three months old. In just the last few weeks, she’s matured so much. Her sentence structure is getting more and more complex. She uses a lot of “{Insert sentence}, but…” She’s been asking endless “why?” questions. She asks what certain words from Chinese are in English, and then what certain English words are in Chinese (then, if I don’t know the answer she will ask Alexa!). She notices the most subtle, discreet things, such as the tiny little green light that goes with the new fire alarms just installed across the rooms of our apartment. If you try to hide something for her, she immediately calls it out and asks inquisitively, “What’s that?” She also has even more refined preferences: when she chooses her books for bedtime story time, she is specific and says she wants this book first, then that book.

Watching Kaia grow is likely the greatest privilege of my life. She is so freaking smart, so loving and affectionate. She picks up things so quickly, and she’s just so happy (most of the time). Every day I look at her, even when she’s being completely irrational and infuriating, and I just don’t know how I got so lucky with her. I recently spoke with a new friend about her IVF journey — four stimulation cycles, several transfers, and three miscarriages, and my heart swelled hearing her story that IVF did not lead to success for her and her husband. Since they started trying years ago, they’ve also been on the adoption route given they wanted to ideally have their own and adopt. Hopefully, that works out for them. But when I shared my own IVF story with her and talk about Kaia, I told her I’m painfully cognizant that not everyone is as lucky as Chris and I have been with our fertility journey.

I only hope that I can have a healthy, functional, and happy relationship with Kaia as she gets older, and that she truly knows I want everything amazing in life for her.