Dear Girls,

As I look out the window of my hospital room, I see all of lower Manhattan and am reminded of so many wonderful things that we have done there.

I look toward Little Italy and think of the house where we lived when Emma was born. It was a nice fourth-floor loft like the one where we live now, but it wasn’t as big and didn’t have an elevator. Climbing all those stairs was good exercise, but after a while, as Emma grew, it got harder to carry her up while clutching a couple bags of groceries.

But I loved our life there. In the mornings, Dad would get up early and go to work and Emma and I would stay in bed dozing for a long time – sometimes until almost noon. Then I would take her out for a walk in the Baby Björn and we’d go to the old Dean and DeLuca on Prince Street, where she would sleep on a table or banquette while I ate lunch and wrote thank you letters for all the great presents people had given us when she was born. We went to a lot of restaurants in those days, and we have ever since, because you girls behave so well in them and enjoy them.

One day when Emma was about two months old, we came home from one of our lunch walks and I had Emma down on the bed and said something like, “We had a nice walk today, didn’t we? We went to the post office and we got a sandwich for mom at Olive’s. Olive’s.” I pronounced the “O” with a high pitch and the “lives” with a lower one. And then Emma said “awives”. I couldn’t believe it, but she was imitating my speech at a very early age. Of course, we practiced saying “olives” all day, and showed Dad the miraculous feat when he got home.

Next, we moved on to “hair”. Dad would quiz Emma endlessly about what was on his head, and Emma would say “air”, which was correct either way you looked at it. When Cam was little, we taught her “hair”, too. And she would say air just like Emma had. The difference was that she might say it while I dangled my hair in her face. And she would be shimmying her hips on the changing table like a ski racer. Both of you girls have always been amazing talkers, and I guess it all started with olives and hair. Everyone has always commented about what an enormous number of words you know. Cameron has learned many of those words from Emma, but also by listening so closely to everything that goes on around her, like Emma does.

Note: Sally was quite sick by the time she wrote this and never got a chance to finish, although we believe she intended to.