My darling Doodlebugs,

There's a song on the CD of music that you insist that we play whenever we are driving anywhere:

Halfway down the stairs

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair where I sit:
There isn't any other stair quite like it.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top:
So this is the stair where I always stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up, and isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town:
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
"It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead!"

A A Milne (I didn't know it was A A Milne. I just Googled the lines.)

It's a song that rattles round in my head most days whilst you are away from me. I find myself singing it, oftentimes quieted by you: "We're not in the car now Mamma." But the reason I think that it resonates with me is not that it was the stair I used to sit on to peer down at my mum and dad as they laughed with the friends who came to dinner, nor the stair that I sat on whilst I waited for my father to come home from work, but because it's the stair that I sit on when I put you to bed. 

There's a ceremony to bedtime that's been around for as long as you have been. It's changed a smidgen now that your sister has joined us, but there are always cuddles, always stories, always singing, always I-love-yous. After I shut the door, there is a routine that you don't see. Once your bedroom doors are closed, and I have gathered up all the bits and pieces that inevitably end up strewn across the floors, I sit, as now, halfway down the stairs and I listen. I am listening for the sounds of peaceful babies: the quiet after a busy day; the calm after the storm. I breathe, as I never really get a chance to breathe during the day when I am with you, because everything you do, everything that you are, takes my breath away. I close my eyes to see events of the day more clearly, to commit them to memory, because you are changing so fast, I'm afraid I might miss things and I'm not ready for you to grow up as quickly as you are doing. I sit and listen, and breathe, and remember, and smile. Because I am your Mamma. I am that lucky.