1. She is a living embodiment of my love for my wife.
2. I can see my wife in her nose, her mouth, I can spot family members in her ears.
3. She makes me think of her future, our future. I already imagine slang in the 2040s.
4. The struggles I face with her make me appreciate my parents as never before.
5. She sneezes and yawns like my wife.
6. The mundane is wonderful: poops are a delight, because it lets us know she’s healthy.
7. Soothing her, as her father, is a creative act. I have no breasts to default to! Each night is a series of experiments in settling her and retaining our sanity.
8. She is ever so small.
9. She has given me even more opportunity to speak with, and spend time with the person I love most, and our family.
10. She’s made me realise how much I have in common with other parents. When my wife and I breach our bubbles and speak to others we realise everyone else has similar thoughts, similar anxieties, follows a rhyming arc of recovery after birth.
11. It is joyful to love her as a priority, and purpose in life.
12. She makes me ambidextrous, I have become more skilled than ever before in opening the changing mat with my left hand while holding her with my right, manipulating a nappy with my foot. I feel like an elephant painting holding a brush with their trunk.
13. She makes me love my wife even more, seeing her become a mother as our daughter falls asleep in her arms.
14. She has made me more hopeful than ever before, I have no option but to be.
15. She squeaks like a tiny velociraptor.
16. She makes me wonder at the world, at my wife who made her.
17. Every day is a surprise, even if the surprise is her peeing on me while I change her.
18. She really does have some personality even now. Perhaps not in aggregate, but in her tiny moments, like suckling furiously with a furrowed brow if my wife has taken an entire 30 seconds to prepare before feeding her.
19. Every day is different, the longest patterns we have are two or three days old at this point. It’s lovely to accept things as they are.
20. She has firsts. A first sneeze, a first bogey. Firsts are amazing wonders.
21. Her face contains infinities. I could while away days looking at nothing else.