Up until this year, we’d never really taken advantage of the play room in our building. I’d taken family and friends who visited to see it, but we never really made use out of it because they never brought kids, and we had no kids of our own up until this point. But given that Kaia is now 9 months old and crawling, I realized that now is the perfect time to get her using the play room. So I brought her there for about an hour this afternoon, and she got to explore the play house, the little matted castle where she can climb up a cushioned stairway, slide, and tunnel. She seemed a little apprehensive initially, but once I gave her an incentive (always, her pacifier or my phone), she went along with it. And to my pleasant surprise, with a little support, she was able to actively and enthusiastically climb up the stairs, which I personally thought were a bit wide apart. But she did it twice! I felt so proud.

My baby is growing so fast. It’s exciting and makes me happy, but makes me feel like time is passing too quickly. Enjoying these moments watching her grow and evolve sometimes doesn’t even seem to be enough. Sometimes, I just want to freeze time and hold her face in my hands and just stare at her and kiss her. My little baby is getting bigger and exploring a little more of the world every single day.

A relative on Chris’s side had gifted Kaia three different outfits when she was born in multiple sizes. She thoughtfully gave a gift receipt because she told us that the hardest thing with getting clothing gifts when her two kids were born was to fit the size of the clothing to the time of year and season when it would actually fit the kid. I’ve realized that this was definitely very relevant because I had to return almost all of the clothes from our baby registry that were gifted simply because the outfits were too warm to wear between 6-9 months, which is essentially summer time here when Kaia would mostly be wearing summery things.

“Kaia has no fall clothing,” our nanny announced to me yesterday while going through her drawers and in the closet. “She needs to have layers and coats. Are you going to get her some?”

We had so much, perhaps even too much clothing, for her first 9 months of life, particularly 0-3 month clothing. I had to actively cycle through certain outfits to ensure she’d at least wear them 3-4 times. Now, her clothing pile has dwindled down as she’s gotten bigger, so we now have to actually buy her clothes to fit her soon-to-be toddler self.

Since Kaia has started really crawling (a few weeks ago, she was “army crawling,” but now she’s REALLY crawling!), she’s definitely accumulated a few scratches here and there on her arms and legs. On top of that, she’s also inevitably managed to bump her head quite a few times. She’s already fallen off the bed once (ugh). While in a sitting position, she occasionally loses balance and falls backwards or sideways and knocks her head. This is fine if she’s on the bed, in her crib, or on the play mat (well, she does cry when she falls on the play mat…), but when it’s on our hardwood floors, it can be painful. Obviously it hurts, and so she usually lets out a cry of terror and shrieks bloody murder for a bit until she is soothed enough.

I always feel so bad whenever I hear her cry like this. I know it’s a normal part of development and growing up; it would be completely unrealistic (and inane) to try to protect her from every scratch or fall). If she never gets hurt, she will never learn and grow. But it still pains me to see her face scrunched up in pain and agony, and all I want to do is hold her to soothe her. But alas, most of the times when these incidents have happened, guess what… I’m tied up to my breast pump. And so I’m usually unable to soothe her, and Chris the savior dad (or what he calls himself, the “ultimate parent”) comes in. It’s another way that Chris gets to build a bond with our daughter that I’m not always able to given pumping. So when I think about mothers who gave up on nursing or pumping early on because they wanted to spend more quality time with their babies, I totally get it. It’s been a huge trade off, but I still stand by my decision to exclusively pump to give the best milk to my baby.

I was recently reading a post in a Facebook Asian moms group about how it’s basically a “right of passage” to experience when your baby falls, whether it’s off the bed, out of a chair, off their changing table. You know how it goes: falls are the number 1 accident that happens with babies that results in some injury. In the newborn days, leaving Kaia in the middle of our bed was not a worry at all because she had no core strength to roll, and so we’d easily leave the room with her on the bed to grab another onesie to get her into — no problem. Once she started rolling at around six months, we had to start creating “barriers” with huge pillows all around her if we’d leave the bed even for a second because we knew she was a fall risk. Sometimes, to ensure she didn’t roll or fall off, I’d give her something I know she would get fixated on, like my (locked screen) phone or her pacifier, so it would buy me at least 30 seconds to a minute where I’d know for sure she’d be safe.

Well, the day finally came when I accidentally let my almost 9-month old baby fall off the bed. I had just finished changing and moisturizing her, and I was letting her roll and squirm around the bed as she pleased. I was at one corner of the bed, and she moved so fast, just outside of arm’s distance away, and fell off the bed — first with her head hitting the cushioned bed frame, then straight onto her head onto the rug. It happened so quickly that I barely even registered what happened for a second until her piercing scream and cries ensued. I quickly grabbed her and pulled her up to look at her, and for a second I wasn’t even sure if she was breathing because she had this look of terror on her face, and she just grew silent for a few seconds before continuing her shrieks of pain and terror. While she did cry a lot and eventually calmed down after being comforted by both of us, luckily, she had no bumps or signs of injury, and so we’ll just be monitoring her over the next 24 hours to ensure she’s fully all right. Within 20 minutes, she returned to her usual babbling, rolling, smiling self, thankfully.

Welp. That was a pretty shitty mom moment. I felt awful about what happened and that I had allowed that to happen. And it only made me realize (in a painful way) exactly how quickly she is developing, how fast she is crawling and rolling around, and I really need to step it up and keep up with her. I need to account for anything that she could get her hands (or mouth) on, I need to ensure she has barriers from dangerous edges, and I need to think three steps ahead before getting too far away from her when she’s on any elevated surface. This is when babies start becoming really dangerous, so I need to keep up with her better moving forward. Sometimes, you learn the hard way, but in this case, at least she is still safe.