My Janey Bear

World, meet Janey Bear.

My first (lucid) thought after giving birth to Jane, when the doctors placed her on my chest and I was endlessly cuddling her, was this:

You have always been a part of this family.

Sometimes parents worry when another child is on the way, about the transition it will be for the family, and whether or not they will be able to love another child as much as the first. Everyone assures you that you will, but it is impossible to imagine until you have lived it.

Having a new family member has certainly been a transition, and not always an easy one, but I never doubted Jane´s place with us. She fit perfectly into a little Jane-shaped hole that I never noticed we had in our family. (I wonder how many more baby-shaped holes we will discover in the future?? ha.)

Janey Bear, as we call her, is everything you could want in a baby. She is easy. She is calm, happy, and extremely cuddly. She is generous with her smiles, which are big and contagious. She thinks her sister is hilarious, and loves tickles when she´s sleepy. She is physically strong and constantly surprises us with what she can do. She has a very girly cry, and makes a heartbreaking face when she uses it, that makes you rush over to fawn over her and make her happy. She loves her blue ball. As soon as she wakes up in the morning, she starts smiling and cooing at us.

She also seems to know exactly what she wants. I remember when she was only days old, and she would look at us so intensely and grunt: ¨uh! uh!¨ and we would know she wanted us to pick her up. She is getting bigger now and has more sounds and faces, but when she wants something, she gets you to understand her in some magic Janey way.

Cuddling and nursing Jane, watching Bella cuddle Jane and make her laugh, watching her fall asleep while Jairo strokes her face, I realize that my first reaction to Jane was exactly right. She was the one thing we never knew we needed.