Dear Eleanor,

Today you turned three months old. You’ve made such strides in the past month, and in the past week especially, that by next month I expect I’ll be writing about how you want to wear make-up and sneak my car out for joyrides (Wear your seat belt!).

We took you on your first plane trip this month, up to Chicago to visit family, including your 97-year-old great-grandpa. I’ve sometimes thought that we should have waited a few more years to have kids, but I’m so glad that he got to see you — his daughter’s daughter’s daughter. If we lived closer, he would spoil you rotten.

I started reciting the alphabet to you a while ago, but you seemed bored with that. So one day, I showed you the letters in sign language, and you were riveted. You held your own hands up and studied them. Is that what these things are for? Because you thought they were just for stuffing in your mouth. Now we do the sign language alphabet daily.

In the past week, you have figured out how to roll from your back onto your stomach, and you are now obsessed with this motion. You constantly flip yourself over in your crib and when I’ve got you laying on the floor, and you even try to roll away when I’m changing your diaper. Can we talk about that for a second? I know that you won’t want to listen to me, that you will want to figure things out for yourself, and I’m OK with that. But you should really stop with the rolling while I change your diaper. Only bad things can come of it.

Once you get onto your tummy, you thrust your legs up and down in an effort to crawl. After a few minutes, you start to wail because you are stuck on your tummy and OH MY GOSH, you hate to be on your tummy. We flip you onto your back, and within five seconds you’ve rolled onto your tummy again.

In the weeks after we brought you home, everyone asked about your birth. How painful was it? How hard was it to take care of a newborn? And no matter what we told them, about how difficult I had found pregnancy to be, about the pain after the C-section, they would say, “But it was all worth it.” And I would smile and say nothing. Because as much as I loved you, in those first few weeks, it wasn’t worth it. I really hated being pregnant, and being a mom was hard – harder than I could have imagined. But yesterday, we had a moment. Your dad and I were admiring the giddy smile you have early in the morning, and we started to laugh at you. And then you started to laugh with us. A real, hearty laugh. I can’t think of a word boundless enough to describe my joy at that sound.

You were worth it.

Love,

Mom

Greg and I live in a pleasant suburban neighborhood, the sort of place where when people come to visit, they tell you how well they slept because it’s so quiet. It’s not the most exciting place for a pair of 20-somethings though. (OK, so Greg is an old man now, but he was a 20-something when we moved in.) We have friends who live very close to downtown, and we talk wistfully about moving closer to the good restaurants and the entertainment venues.

But our house is the perfect place for kids, a good place for Eleanor to grow up. We’re on a corner lot, and across one street is a park and swimming pool; across the other is an elementary school. By all accounts, this is a safe place to live.

And I read about some scary places to live when I’m at work, neighborhoods plagued by drug dealers and robberies. The other day, we had a story about a woman who has been charged with running brothels in town. Police say she might have been bringing in illegal immigrants to work in the brothels.

At the end of the story, we named the street she lives on. And it’s four blocks from our house! She lives in quaint, boring suburbia. What else is going on out here that we don’t know about? I’m not sure whether to be dismayed or happy that we would actually have a valid excuse to move.