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A LETTER TO BABY COOP

NOVEMBER 11th, 2014

This will always be your first house. 

If you follow after your dad you'll grow up calling it something like, "the house with the field in the backyard," or "the house with the blue wall." If you follow after me, you'll remember everything from the street number to the postal code. 

We'll drive by years later and it will kinda sorta ring a bell. Maybe you'll remember a Christmas or two spent here. But your dad and I will remember it well... 

We'll remember how your dad proposed, on a plywood floor in what would be the master bedroom, a full 6 months before the house would be ready. We'll remember getting the keys and eating pizza on the living room floor after everything was moved in. We'll remember when Weezy was just a little puppy dog, running around trying to get the lay of his new land.

We'll remember the argyle wall that came and went; a story for another day. We'll remember the way some of the doors never shut all the way, but that we didn't mind since we never needed them shut.

We'll remember walking through the front door after every single vacation, from a couple of days in Toronto to a week in Paris. We'll remember that it never really stopped smelling like a new house. We'll remember hanging two stockings on Christmas of 2011, three stockings on Christmas of 2012, and four stockings on Christmas of 2014.

We'll remember the times that people filled every inch of the place. The housewarming, the we're-not-pregnant-everybody-drink party, the gender reveal. We'll remember how we used to line the bar top with food and drink for the whole family on Christmas morning.

We'll remember bringing you home from the hospital; that quiet house...you were sleeping and we just sat and looked at you. We'll remember a handful of sleepless nights (sleep training, or just the occasional fluke).

We'll remember how the sun poured in through the patio doors in the evening; nothing behind us but a field and a line of trees. We'll remember that this was our dream house...even when years have passed and we've outgrown it by a couple thousand square feet...we'll remember this as home.