Happy First Birthday Annalise!

For as long as I can remember, and before my memories began, I've loved babies. I cradled my dollies, I kissed them, I rocked them, I pushed them in their baby buggies and tucked them into their cradles at night. Nothing was more delightful to me. Nothing was more charming, more thrilling. How I longed for my own baby. How I yearned for a girl.

One year ago today, due to a number of blessedly miraculous circumstances, my greatest dreams came true.

I found the man of my dreams and he loved me back. We got married and sealed in the temple, ensuring that if we lived righteously, any children born to us would be ours forever. Our bodies worked how we hoped. I became pregnant with a healthy child. I gave birth to her and she became the most important rapturous thrilling exciting frustrating delightful amazing sleep-depriving interesting scintillating creature I've ever had the privilege of beholding. Miraculous, all of it indeed.

We have often said that Annalise is better than any TV show. We could sit and just watch her for hours, and we often do. Every laugh, every noise, every "word", every expression, titillates us beyond measure. She delights us. She enraptures us. We are so charmed and deeply proud that there are no words to describe her. She is better than anything else, so there is nothing to compare her to.

The love I feel for her is all-encompassing, all-demanding. It overshadows any other emotion, need, want, or desire I might have for myself. Her care and well-being are so strongly at the forefront of my priority-list that remembering myself at all often feels foreign when it happens.

We have traveled through a year together. We've seen every season, experienced an entire rotation of the planet. We've known each other as intimately at two beings can. She is of me, from me, because of me. I remember stroking her hand when she was born, wondering if I too might feel her sensations with her, marveling when I could not.

I am learning that much as I wish I was, I am not a perfect mother. But she is a perfect daughter. She is loyal, darling, inquisitive, demanding, intense, loud, charismatic, flirty, insistent, determined, rough, gentle, happy, smart, sociable, loving, and mine.

Nobody has ever been more lucky.

Happy birthday, darling girl. I pray that you are kept happy and safe, comforted and protected, all the days of your life. May they be many, that the joy your parents have through knowing you might be had by many. May you always be blessed, as you have blessed our lives beyond our wildest dreams. I love you more than words can say, more than hearts should rightly feel, and more truly unconditionally than any other I have known. Happy birthday, my love.