The Stories of our Lives

It has been a whole year, already, that I was lying on a hospital bed soiled with sweat, blood and fluids, shivering with cold (it took a real long while for my temperature to settle back up!), and that I first saw my quiet tiny sweetie, and took her in my arms.

She is a pink and magic fairy, Orléane. She might well exasperate her parents once in a while, but she still has the uncanny ability to make us smile from one ear to the other, with her blondie head all dusted with sun. In fact, it looks as if there are sun rays growing out of her scalp, so apt is her thin and wacky hair to catch the light.

Maybe she does not have wings yet, but she manages without problem to land where she wishes, whether by toddling proudly throughout the house or, as needed, by pulling on the most vulnerable adults’ pant legs and be lifted to a better vantage point.

And as if it was not enough to get her meaning across by sweetness and insistence, she is now plucking words one by one, so she can transform them into enchanted droplets to splatter into our conversations. A “cat” here, a “more” there… and a little verbal frustration when miss finds herself “(S)TUCK!” in her high chair or she cannot free a toy.

We don’t tire of seeing her smile – snickering or Mona Lisa – and we love even during the milky reunions in the nook of night. Her borther and her, they are our two great sources of pride, and we wish to tell her “Happy Birthday, pretty Orléane! Your parents are real proud of you, and you make them happy.”.

A pic a month: