I am convinced our daughter thinks everyone she loves lives in a small white box.

Our daily FaceTime chat with Dad while he was stationed in San Antonio.

When Tamzin came into this world, red-faced and screaming, my iPhone, held by the anesthetist’s assistant, was probably one of the first objects she saw after the doctor’s scalpel. From that moment on, hundreds of moments each and every day have been captured by this phone, which I affectionately dubbed my “AiPhone”.

“Ai” in Mandarin Chinese means “Love,” and I was studying Chinese, preparing for the move to Shanghai that didn’t quite work out as planned (hello, Abu Dhabi), when I got my first iProduct: an iPod, second generation. I have called each iPod and iPhone since then my “AiProducts.”

This iPhone – my white AiPhone 5- is probably my favorite.

With it, I have been able to capture thousands of memories in my daughter’s first half-year of life (thousands of which you have probably seen), and with it, plan on capturing (and sharing) many more.

[Remember: you were warned.]

A pre-birth announcement that people may want to adjust their newsfeed settings if they didn’t want to see a whole lotta baby Joostjie real soon.

But: besides the Instagrams, the videos, the mobile uploads and the kabillion close-ups of my daughter’s toes, my iPhone also gave us the ability to build a relationship between my husband and his daughter while he was stationed in San Antonio completing Advanced Individual Training for the National Guard. I was back home, living for a while with my mother, then living alone in our apartment in Philadelphia.

Dave saw his daughter for the first time the day after she was born, at around 11 pm EST when he was finally allowed phone privileges after his day’s training. She was asleep in one of those little plastic heated bassinets they wheel newborns around in, swaddled and with a green Soothie stuck in her mouth that one of the nurses must have given her when she was being weighed in the Nurse’s Station. I held the phone next to her, and Dave was able to see the outline of her little face in the dim light of our room. She wiggled when she heard him; she lifted her chin towards the phone, and I knew she recognized his voice.

From that night forward, we were able to FaceTime with Dave with increasing frequency, who was working his way up through his training and therefore gaining more privileges with each passing week. At first, she paid little attention to the screen. But she soon started staring at it, studying it, and finally when that smile arrived for the first time at around six weeks, more and more smiles were reserved for her father, who would coo at her from across the country, through the screen.

When he finally held her in his arms, she knew him. She absolutely did. OK I do think biology had a lot to do with that. But I also think Apple did, too.

She grew more and more accustomed to having a screen stuck in her face at any point, day or night. Photos I took were frequently in the form of “selfies” that I would take with her at a variety of locations (See the first of the Tamzin Memes: “Tamzin. At the beach. Tamzin at the beach), and during FaceTime chats with her Dad, in which she could see her own reflection in the top corner of the screen. Research shows that babies do not initially recognize themselves as themselves in a mirror, that until around 18 months, most babies look in a mirror and see another object. Increasingly, this is an object with which they become familiar, this “other” eventually becoming a “sociable playmate,” until eventually they look at their own reflection and are able to begin to grasp the concept of self.

“Hey! There’s another baby in there with Mom!”
“Hey. There’s another baby in there with Mom.”

If we’re going to be honest, I’d bet that about half of the smiles her father got during our FaceTime chats were directed at him; I think the other half were directed at this person she was seeing a whole lot of in mirrors and in that little white box that was constantly being waved in front of her face. That OTHER baby. In any case, that phone screen started being equated with smiles and laughter, Daddy, and a super-cute baby, straight from the get-go.

*My phone was also ever-present from the beginning because as any modern, tech-savvy mother knows, they make apps now to help you keep track of feedings. I can thank my sister Annie for finding this one for me the very night Tamzin was born. That thing recorded each and every feeding, day or night, for her first three months of life. So, the phone was ALWAYS around. Because that girl was ALWAYS eating.  

Dave came home in October, and is an intuitive, loving, present, and affectionate father. He is up with me, with her, at all hours – in the middle of the night, in the wee hours of the morning – and has taken over bath time, which went from a 15-minute task-oriented affair before he came home to a now at least 45-hour minute long production in which I think every single toy and animal-shaped bath mitt is taken out and played with. I know our FaceTime chats allowed him to initiate this relationship with her even before he came home. That’s when Tamzin really started to dig him. The super-long bath times now are just gravy.

These days, we have daily FaceTime chats with my mother, who is called “Omi.”

My mother and Tamzin during one of their morning chats.

Each and every morning, almost without fail, we manage to have a 10 to 15-minute conversation on FaceTime in which I ask my mother no fewer than two dozen questions about how to keep my daughter alive, and Tamzin gets to see her grandmother. My step-father, known as “Pop,” also pops onto the screen during FaceTime sessions in the evening, and Tamzin also regularly FaceTimes with my best friend, my sisters, and my father and step-mother, “Poppy and Nana.”

When she sees these individuals in person, they are familiar to her: she’s not only spent a lot of time in person with them by now, but she’s also gazed at their faces and listened to their voices through the telephone screen a whole lot since she was born.

She tries to grab at the phone now; I hear that’s a phase babies go through. But I like to think that she’s grabbing for it because she thinks that everyone she loves: her father, her Omi and Pop, Poppy and Nana, and all the other people pouring love and affection into her life, live in that little white box when they’re not with her.

And that does make it a little box of love, doesn’t it?

“Ai” means “Love” (Also? Click here for a special treat. Oh, only the best Chinese song ever).