She has finally learned to say it right. Almost:

‘I love you… infinity… back… infinite times’.

I had been telling her this since the day she was born: ‘I love you to infinity and back infinite times’. It’s so rewarding to hear her say it back.

My daughter is a talker. She does not stop. And if you try to explain something, ‘but why’ will never end. At night, thankfully, she does not talk so much, but the still talks. These days, in the middle of the night, she wakes me up with one of the two: either ‘Mama, I love you’, which melts my heart in the darkest and coldest of nights, or ‘Mama, cover me up’, which makes me wanna wish she was a grown up and could cover herself up.

She is my best friend. I love her to bits.

Of course, it’s not easy at times and she puts me straight with her ‘Mama, but I’m only a little girl’, when I get carried away.

Sometimes, however, she does act like an adult, when I’m the one who cries.

Like the other night.

I was pretending to be a teacher, meeting a new student for the first time. We do this kind of role playing a lot. When I asked the girl about her mama, she told me her mama went to work on work days, and did not work on weekends.

When I asked her about her daddy, she told me he had died. She said she didn’t remember much of her daddy, only that he had pretty hair.

And so I invited her to look at some videos with daddy, so she could see him and hear his voice. I haven’t seen his videos in a while myself so I was eager to re-visit the past.

And you know what? I found two videos I had only seen once before, both made over 4 years ago. And they were beautiful. Just Beno and I (with the baby in the belly).

Seeing the videos made me emotional and I started to cry. My daughter instantly took me in her arms and started wiping my tears.

‘Don’t cry, mama, I am here with you’, – she kept repeating.

How extremely grateful I am to have her in my life. How enormously lucky.

And even though I try to be as honest as I can with her about many things in life, including death, sometimes it all becomes just too surreal.

Many a time, before falling asleep, my girl says: ‘Good night. Sweet dreams. Don’t die’. I got used to the last bit by now and I assure her that I won’t.

One time, she said that and went on: ‘Let’s check in the morning if none of us died, if we can move. And if we can’t, we just stay together. Just you and I’. And that’s when I cried, again.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom in our neighborhood. We have so much fun together. You can often find me dancing and singing with my daughter on the trolley, at the bus stop, in the store. You can find us playing with the balloon and laughing out loud when it hits the person sitting in front of us on the bus.

We get excited about the little things.

Especially now, with Christmas around the corner, the mood in our house is festive.

We don’t have fancy decorations, we don’t have a huge Christmas tree. What we got is each other.