My Valentine's Gift to My Daughter Cannot Be Wrapped

Burning love.Three years ago, in the weeks leading up to my daughter's birth, I started putting stuff in a box, in a time capsule.

My hope was that someday she and her mom and I could all sit around and crack it open and sift through it and out would come flowing a flood of memories. And we would be stunned, at how cool it all was, and by the fact that I had bothered to save a lot of what I did.

It was one of those plastic jobs with the latch handles you can get for eight bucks at Target or wherever. And pretty quickly, the box started to fill up.

I put everything in.

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There were nine months worth of those doctor appointment reminder cards, one for each time Monica and I went in to make sure everything was going okay. By the time Violet was nearly ready to arrive, we were at the doctor's office once a week, so there were a lot of cards.

There were goofy things, of course, receipts from the eight thousand trips we took to Babies 'R' Us and all those places. I kept them hoping we could run our eyes down them together in twenty years and laugh at how many outfits we ended up buying her before she landed safely in our arms. We were so excited; we were so charmingly naive.

People sent cards congratulating us. They went in the box. And gifts from our baby registry: I'd put the packing lists in the box, so someday maybe Violet could personally thank the people who made sure she had a high chair or warm blankets when she arrived. On Christmas, 2008, I was so excited that our baby was due in just a month that I bought her a Christmas card and filled it all out and sealed it and tossed it in the 'Magic Box' as I came to call it. I was thinking Violet could maybe open it some Christmas down the road.

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I put in a lot of seemingly obscure things too, things that would raise your eyebrows, but each one had a story behind it.

There were burrito wrappers from the local Mexican joint; Monica, plagued by serious morning sickness, practically lived on the Carne Asada footballs the whole time Violet was cooking in there. She found them to be one of the only things she could slam down and then reverse it back into to this world without minding the flavor all that bad.

The night we went into the hospital for the birth, I naturally gathered up all of the different newspapers I could possibly find. I wanted to be able to flip through them someday with Violet and Monica, each of us shouting out stuff to the other two, about what was going on in the world back at the moment her jet was dipping down out of the Heavens and getting ready to land.

I kept everything from the hospital the whole time we were there. Every menu, every little fuzzy hat they stuck on her tiny head, the first blanket they ever swaddled her body in, I put them in the Magic Box.

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They gave Monica a hard-plastic cup for her water. It had a sticker on it, her patient info and all. I put it in the box.

First binky. In the box.

Two tissues they used to dab her first sweet little blood drops after her first needle. Hell yeah, it's weird. But I was so in love. So in they went.

We went home, as a family, and we started living our lives. But every time anything really happened, if we were out at McDonald's or walking down some new trail in the woods, I'd always remember to stick a couple napkins or a pebble or two in my pockets. For later. For the box.

Then, three years in, about six weeks ago, the damn Magic Box ran out of magic and burnt up into nothingness when our house caught fire ... the physical items, at least. The memories attached to each one - the doctor's visits, first shots, pregnancy burritos - are all still around. I am just writing this so that Violet and Henry know that me and your mom had good boxes going for each of you.

But it doesn't matter, because we're getting new boxes tomorrow or the next day. I promise. Bomb-proof ones.

And we'll just take it from there.

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