Eighteen days old. 11/15/05.
Custom Memories.
One of the things on my to-do list is going through TinyE's baby clothes and finding the items that we can reuse for Baby Sister. It sounds simple enough, but it's something I've been avoiding… and pondering for a while.
When we learned that we were having another girl, one of my thoughts was, "That's great, we can re-use the clothes we have." I had no problem envisioning myself going through the clothes and snipping away the left sleeves, sewing them up to match the right sleeves we customized over a year ago for TinyE.
There's part of me that thinks it's a practical move. It's something that says, "Yep, let's just move on and make these clothes work for the next one."
But there's another part of me that thinks doing so is a way of pretending it didn't happen, i.e., changing the clothes back to "normal". And in the softest part of my heart, I treasure the look of the tiniest outfits:
Some with the sleeve shorn off all the way up to the shoulder.
Some with the sleeve cut off halfway down.
Some with the sleeve neatly trimmed, the delicate decorations on the edge lovingly replaced so it still matches the other sleeve.
It all reminds me of who we were: two brand-new new parents learning everything about this tiny, brand-new little girl, yet also integrating the idea that her version of normal was different from what we planned on. The pretty little clothes that had been waiting for her in the closet weren't going to be a perfect fit right away; much like our adapting to life as a family, there was going to be trial and error.
Some days were rough, like the sleeves that I simply hacked away in a rush, because I wanted TinyE to wear something new and I didn't have the patience to do a better job. Some days were more perfect, like the outfits with sleeves customized by Grandma and gently returned to us in a neat stack.
When TinyE was four months old, I started using a sewing machine to make the customizations. Our time as a family and my time spent shortening sleeves were still on a parallel course: the routine more familiar, the reality of it not as shocking, fewer tears shed during the process, and the results getting better every day.
Two plastic storage bins full of baby clothes sit in the crawl space, waiting for my attention. But no matter which outfit I look at, each one is TinyE, in her very special way. Most will probably be passed on to Baby Sister: the short sleeve outfits that were never altered, my favorite outfits that I just plain old want to see on our next daughter.
But a select handful will stay exactly the way they are; treasures that I can show to TinyE when she's older. Because some things you never want to change, no matter what.
