This is a flashback post I wrote almost three years ago when P was still attending daycare in Japan.

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I am real proud of my daughter. After almost a year in daycare, she is a changed toddler. LOL. She does not cry when I am away and is enjoying her time playing with the kids there. I took a peek before I picked her up yesterday and saw her playing with the toy telephone and talking as if I was on the other end of the line.

The sweet conversation went like this:

“Mom, this is me!”

“Are you working?” and then capped by

“See you later, I love you!”

I was touched at the sight of that gesture and melted when I heard the little, unscripted chat she made up in her innocent mind.

She sings songs on our way back home, in our bath times together and even when she is playing alone. She loves the action songs taught in school! But because all the kiddie songs are in Japanese, I had to ask her teachers for a copy and practiced the movements with them. The other Jap moms looked at me thinking I was crazy but I don’t care, I want to participate, make up for the lost time during the day when I am away from my precious one. I want us to sing and dance together, not just because I know she will love it but because I am enjoying it.

I am simply amazed by my young daughter’s progress. Lately, she can even let out words in English and in my dialect, words she picked up from my everyday mixed conversations. I am talking in English and in my Philippine dialect more and more because she readily repeats them and it is so funny to hear her talking in my language.

During bedtime, exchanging kisses of goodnight is an everyday ritual. But lately, she “enhanced” it by holding both my cheeks with her little, soft baby hands and then pulling me closer before she rests a kiss on my face. That is the most loving gesture any one has ever done to me!

Isn’t it amazing how your heart fills with so much joy at the sight of your child doing the (loving) things you thought they are still incapable of?

I came upon some video tapes inside the video camera bag last weekend. It contained recorded movies taken more than three years ago using our old cam corder. In it was my daughter, just around 8 months old.

Boy, had she changed in a span of those three short years! The eight month old baby in the video had very little hair on her very round head (no one could have guessed she’d have her curly tresses now), with very chubby cheeks and sweet, sweet smile on her face. She could not walk yet, nor talk. The video was recorded, as displayed in the monitor, at the unholy times of midnight, or early dawn. Those were the times when my daughter wakes up in the middle of the night and play after feeding.

When she turned seven months old, my mother came to Japan to watch over her because I took short-term courses in the nearby community college. Some parts of the video recorded by my mother showed my daughter playing during daytime, cooing and practicing to walk. Her first babble of “mamma” was even caught on the camera without me in it. My mother heard my daughter struggle for her first words and I was not there to witness it. My classes were from 9:30 to 3:30 p.m. and although I would be home by 4 and coming home during lunch to be with my daughter, I still consider myself an “absentee mom”. Although I detest the sound of that word, it is true that I was not there all the time from the moment she turned 7 months.

The sleepless nights, examinations to pass, the strenuous pumping milk out of myself like a cow to supply my little daughter’s needs while I am away, all these and many more I experienced and survived. Survived but not quite so, because I had bouts of insomnia and bulimia-like syndrome afterwards.

Now, looking at the video of my little daughter, I wished I had more allowances for her. I wished I hugged her more and spent time with her. It is strange to say I miss that baby on the video when I am looking at it while cuddling the same baby (only older) with me. During those times, all I felt was “exhaustion” and “hardships”, I forgot all about the essence of being a mother. I had too much to do I would wake up after feeding (I was breastfeeding fully for 22 months) her. I wish I stayed more, cuddled her more.

But it’s not too late. The video was a lesson for me to take time and smell the flowers, or smell the baby for this matter, because time spent with them comes and goes. Oh how that time went so quickly, before I knew it, Pristine is already 4 years old and starting to create a world of her own.