Bathmats and Grapes

I felt a little bit sad today when I realized that we are going to be moving away from Sophie's favourite place in our house, our bathroom floor. Of all the rooms in our house, and all the cozy and snuggly environments we have created, Soph loves the bathmat. Sophie lays on our bathmat and kicks up a storm while I shower, brush my teeth and 'use the facilities'. I realized one day that Sophie always smiles the biggest smile on the bathroom floor.

I love it because it's a place that I would least expect her to love. Before I had her I would never think to myself "my baby will love lying on the bathroom floor". It is so cool to me that she is her own person. That she loves something that surprises me, that I wouldn't have guessed about her. She is a unique human with her own likes and dislikes already....incredible to me.

When she was born I was shocked when I noticed things about her that I hadn't anticipated. She had beautifully long fingers and feet, and her fingernails needed to be trimmed. And she had a full head of hair. When I had pictured my baby, I had never imagined those things. For some reason this was the first shocking realization that Sophie was her own person, not just an extension of me.

Back to the mat. I have a love/hate relationship with her on the mat. Obviously I love seeing her happily squirming on the floor. It really is quite sweet. But it's never clean enough for her. Instead of seeing her smiling face sometimes I only see the dirty bathmat, thinking about people's feet walking on it, and feel guilty that I should have cleaned it, or laid another blanket on top of it (my sister tells me I need to get out of my head and I think she's right).

It reminds me of a story that my dad recently told me about a family trip to DisneyWorld. On the drive home my parents asked us what our favourite part of Disney had been. We answered that it had been the grape drink. My parents had driven 24 straight hours through precarious March weather with 3 boisterous kids, paid lots for admission for five to Disney (and money was tight) and our favourite thing about the day was a grape drink.

But if you can believe it I can still remember the drink. It was purple plastic and shaped like a grape. I couldn't tell you how old I was, where I drank it, anything else about the place, other than the plastic grape. It just proves to me that we never know what is going to make an impression on our kids. We give them all of these experiences hoping that it will help to foster them into confident and loving humans. We have no ideas which ones they will remember, that will affect them, and why the heck they do remember the things they do.

Of course as a four month old Sophie will not remember the bathmat and it won't affect her personality (oh no, maybe she'll be walked all over like a doormat. JUST KIDDING!! I'm not that coo-coo yet). But I am so excited to continue to be surprised by what she will love. The things that I don't expect. Discovering Sophie's grape drink.