Hailee Steinfeld has revealed the name of her baby daughter in a heartfelt letter published on her Substack, Beau Society, on Friday, 19 June.
The actress and singer, 29, addressed the post directly to her infant, 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 expecting in December, and welcomed Harper in April.
The letter was tender and unhurried, capturing the particular disorientation of new parenthood with striking clarity.
“You’ve been here for only a short while now, and somehow it feels as though you’ve always been ours,” Steinfeld wrote.
“There are moments (like right now, as you sleep so soundly on my chest), I still look at you and wonder how you’re real. These last few months have been beautiful and exhausting. Sacred and so special. The longest days and the shortest season all at once.”
She reflected on how the transformation of becoming a mother doesn’t announce itself in obvious ways.
“It isn’t always in the big moments,” she wrote.
“Sometimes it’s realizing that I no longer measure time in months or years, but in ounces, naps missed and naps miraculously taken, in diaper changes, and the quiet triumph of a successful transfer from my arms to your crib.”
She also wrote about the bittersweet awareness of time already passing.
“Everyone tells me not to blink. Now I understand why. Because already, I miss versions of you that still feel like yesterday.”
And looking ahead: “I could tear up at the thought of your tiny toes getting bigger, but I know that someday your big-girl feet will carry you through this big world.”
The letter closed with the line that perhaps said it most simply: “My heart is now somehow living outside of my body and it always will.”
