To the lights of my life: I am 37 weeks pregnant with your brother. Before he arrives, when I fear you will become “big girls” overnight, I am taking these last few weeks to savor you two as my babies. I am so grateful to have spent every single day of these past 16 months since I left my job in your company – waking you in the mornings; talking to you over our morning breakfast ritual; reading with you; drawing with you; painting with you; singing with you; pretending with you; cuddling you; even disciplining you, and learning to discipline myself with new patience and language and empathy – often failing – then reassuring you; swimming with you; having “dance parties” with you; building things with you; learning puzzles with you; cooking and baking with you; cleaning up our messes together; learning with you about how to navigate and nurture your magical, omnipresent, complicated sister relationship – something I never experienced myself and delight in more than I think you can ever know; pushing you on swings; pulling weeds and planting seeds in the garden with you; watching you develop your likes and dislikes; seeing you play (and fight) with friends, learning about how to process your impulses and emotions; trying to figure out how much to intervene and attempt to “shape” behavior I find desirable, and how much to step back and allow you to discover the results of your actions; teaching you about the potty and celebrating your every excretion; witnessing your extraordinary and parallel acquisition of language and vocabulary – in English and now a smattering of Hawaiian; watching you learn from, and practice, new skills with each other, back and forth – one of the most magical gifts of twin parenting; eavesdropping on your morning, naptime, and bedtime conversations and negotiations with each other, catering to – and then getting fed up with – your food preferences; washing and folding your tiny clothes, which seem to get bigger by the day; managing the epic battles over who wears which clothing item when I don’t take the easy way out by dressing you identically; accepting the bottomless generosity of family and friends who have wrapped you in the clothing and toys and memories of their own babies and showered you with precious new treasures, and then, in turn, parting with the clothes I have loved tucking your precious little bodies into for the new joy of seeing them worn again by younger family and friends; waking in the night to hold and soothe you (although, more often than not, your father is the one who holds you in the night, bathes you before bedtime, and explores the yard with you at dusk while I cook dinner; most nights you return to me for dinner bearing gifts from the bounty of our little home: lemons, flowers, peaches, poha berries, kabocha pumpkins, bananas, the neighbor’s tangerines, herbs). Every night, freshly washed and combed and jammied, you sit on either side of my lap while I inhale the smells of just clean babies and read stories picked by each of you. I hold you. I kiss every part of your faces. Daddy and I put you in your cribs together. We tell each other I love you individually. For the past few months, as my belly has grown, and intruded on my ability to carry you both at the same time and disturbed the comfort of having you both on my lap at once, you have kissed your baby brother goodnight in my tummy, hugged him, told him that you are his big titas, and told him that you love him. I have wondered how I will hold a newborn while reading to you both in my lap, wondered how two adults will be able to hold three babies at once to put you to bed at night. I know it will all work out, that there will be plenty of love to go around, that we will create new goodnight and I love you rituals, that I am a mother blessed far beyond my due. I am eager and ready to meet and know this new baby brother in the intimate and passionate way I have come to know you two. But I am also mourning just the same that you will no longer be my babies – that I might not always have enough arms and laps for all my children. You have known waiting and sharing and taking turns since your lives began together in utero, and I am so grateful for the preparation that has given you for having a new sibling, whom I know you will love as wholeheartedly and fiercely as you love each other. But for these last few days and weeks while you are still my littlest babies, forgive me if I allow you your binkies and lovies a little too often, smother you a little too much with my kisses, hold and rock you a little too long when you are ready to run. Your births, infancies, and babyhoods have given me the fullest and most ecstatic joys of my life. I expect your childhoods and adulthoods will continue to do so. But in these last sweet days before our new baby joins our family, I am holding you a little more tightly to me, and cherishing my baby girls who first made me a mother. No mama could be more deeply in love than I am with the two of you, my Leimaka’ohawai Jeanne and Ku’umomiokeawala’i Marie. And yet, here I am, on the threshold of falling madly in love all over again.