At dinner last night Piper asked about her baby self. She says she can’t remember it at all. “I try really hard,” she said,”but I can’t remember anything.”

We told her she was smiley and easy going, which is mostly true. We told her how much she loved seeing her sister. Piper lit up like a candle whenever she heard Sissy’s voice. We told her she slept best amidst noise (she spent 9 months growing inside me in a high school classroom) and cried when it was too quiet. She wasn’t a fussy baby, but we knew when something was really wrong. A Piper has always figured out how to get her needs met. We described her bald baby head and her amber brown eyes. We told her that she rolled over at two weeks, walked at nine months, but hardly spoke a word until she was two.

We didn’t tell her how many times she scared us, like when she stopped breathing and the paramedics had to come or how she came into the world wrapped tight and blue in her umbilical chord. We didn’t mention that her acid reflux was so bad she hardly slept the first year and woke up gurgling a lot. She doesn’t need to know about the time Sissy brought home the flu, and we were so sick that I just laid in the middle of the living room nursing Piper because I couldn’t get up off the floor. And she won’t remember when she climbed up into her high chair and fell, splitting her teeth through her bottom lip and I sat in the emergency room all night with her asleep in my lap waiting for stitches.

We told her she’s always been a joy, even when she roars.