Hailee Steinfeld has revealed her daughter’s name in a heartfelt letter posted to her Substack, Beau Society, on Friday, June 19.
The actress and singer, 29, addressed the post directly to her baby girl, Harper Haize Allen, the first child she shares with husband Josh Allen, the NFL quarterback she married in Santa Barbara last May.
The couple announced they were pregnant in December and welcomed Harper in April.
The letter was tender and slow, and captured the particular disorientation of new parenthood with surprising clarity.
“You’ve been here for a short time and somehow I feel like you’ve always been ours,” Steinfeld wrote.
“There are times (like now, while you sleep so soundly on my chest), I still look at you and wonder how real you are. These past few months have been beautiful and exhausting. Sacred and very special. The longest days and the shortest season, all at the same time.”
She reflected on how the transformation of becoming a mother is not announced in obvious ways.
“It’s not always in the big moments,” he wrote.
“Sometimes it’s realizing that I no longer measure time in months or years, but in ounces, missed naps and miraculously taken naps, in diaper changes and the silent triumph of a successful transfer from my arms to your crib.”
He also wrote about the bittersweet awareness of the passage of time.
“Everyone tells me not to blink. Now I understand why. Because I already miss versions of you that still seem like yesterday.”
And looking ahead: “I might cry thinking about your little toes getting bigger, but I know that someday your big girl feet will carry you across this big world.”
The letter ended with the phrase that perhaps said it most simply: “My heart now, in some way, lives outside my body and always will.”
