Love, Love, Love

   My niece is 18 months old. And she is perfection.
   Watching her with my mother is captivating. In The Poisonwood Bible (by Barbara Kingsolver,I recommend it!) there's a passage that struck me so much I reread it over and over again, unable to turn the page. Leah, the protagonist, is watching her mother with her baby sister and says: "..I could see the two of them in the mirror. Mother singing soft questions and kissing her answers into the tiny, outstretched palms. Adah and I were nine then, too old to be jealous of a baby, but still I had to wonder if she had ever loved me that much."
   Babies are magical. The moments I spend with her are pure bliss.
   We lie cuddling on my sister's bed, watching The Lion King before she goes to sleep. This is one of the rare moments she is still and willing to be (mostly) quiet; She is so like my sister: constantly in motion and never, ever silent. I play with her soft, curly hair and kiss her head. "You'll always be my little baby girl," I whisper in her ear.
   These moments fill up my entire heart. Infants and toddlers redefine your capacity to love, stretch out your heart to limits you never imagined it could reach, and then double it. It's unlike any relationship with a grown person; you want to memorize every inch, every giggle, every syllable, and ingrain it all into your mind. But you lose so much of it. I'm heartbroken for every detail I've already forgotten, and every detail I will soon forget. How could I bear to part with the vividness of the present, from the mischievous giggle right before she pours her cereal on the floor to the loud, repetitive song she maintains through entire car rides, the nonsensical chorus of DOPPA DOPPA DOPPA DOPPA she never gets sick of belting out? My current favorite is the way she repeats the word wow every time I say it; so incredulously, so sincerely: WOOOWW! She is genuinely thrilled by the tiniest, most insignificant things.
   Sometimes things are so goddamn beautiful it breaks my heart a little bit.