These days are precious.

I can't believe how unbelievably lucky I am.

Going back to work at 7 weeks postpartum was very difficult. It was exhausting and hectic to return to work, but it was also great to be back in the classroom and return to a sense of "normalcy" -- even if it was a very different "new normal" than what I had been used to.

To be honest, I was excited but also a little nervous about having the month of July off with my baby. I had experienced only a few days alone with her during my maternity leave and I remembered them as being very challenging -- tiring (Will this baby ever take a nap so I can get some sleep?), confusing (Is she hungry again? I feel like I just finished feeding her . . .) and just generally stressful (If things are difficult now, what will it be like when I go back to work?). I wasn't sure what, if anything, would make the summer with her easier than my maternity leave had been.

Then, something amazing happened. Ben needed to burn off some PTO days. A lot of PTO days. He asked for the entire month of July off and, to our delight, he was approved.

We're two weeks in and I still can't believe how happy I am. Every day feels like an amazing gift. I don't know if it's because Greta is out of the "fourth trimester" or whether it's because Ben and Greta and I have all fallen into a pretty reliable and pleasant schedule, or whether it's something else entirely, but I feel like this is the kind of bliss that I have to cherish.

Greta has found her toes and I am perfectly content to watch her hanging onto them while she plays in her gym. The best is when she has a hand on each foot, but also wants to play with a toy. Sometimes she'll take a hand off of a foot for a moment to caress a toy. Sometimes she'll try to touch or hold the toy with her feet. Other times she'll keep a thumb on her foot and reach out with the pinky of the same hand to touch the toy. I could just let the minutes pass by, talking to her and watching her decision-making process as she weighs her relative priorities.

Since Ben and I are both second-born children, I get a little bittersweet about this month -- realizing that this is the kind of attention that we will probably only get to lavish upon our family this one summer. Future children, if there are any, will not enjoy this kind of attention -- even if we could take a whole month off of work again, the attention would still be shared between the siblings.

It's something that just has to be accepted, but as a fan of symmetry, it's still hard to do. Do I wish my parents had never had me, because if they'd stopped at one child there would be no inequity between the two? No, not really. There are lots of reasons that I am glad that I was born and I don't actually remember feeling particularly neglected as a second child. And there are even advantages -- for example, my sister cites the years that I got with my parents after she went away to college as a source of jealousy for her. I also never knew the frustration of being an only child and then having a younger intruder sibling enter the family.

In education, we often talk about how "fair"is not the same as "equal' -- meaning, that we must do our best to give every individual what he or she needs, rather than trying to make sure that everyone gets the same thing. I think the best Ben and I can do as parents is to make sure that Greta and any future siblings experience childhoods that feel fair, even though there is no way to make them equal.

And of course there's a possibility that Greta will remain our only child, which makes fretting over differences between her experience and that of our hypothetical second child particularly pointless.

No, the only thing to be done is to cherish every moment. I don't need to worry about being a parent of two right now because I only have one. I don't need to worry about all the difficult developmental phases yet to come, because right now my baby is the sweetest person I can imagine. I don't need to worry about how things will change again in two weeks when I'm back at work and life gets crazy again because I can only commit to being grateful and happy for the time that we have together as a family of three, making the most of each joyful day.