Dear Kate: One year.
Dear Kate,
Today you are one year old. You don’t know this, because we celebrated yesterday. It was more convenient for us, and we have that kind of control over your life until you learn to count and read a calendar. I like to brag about that control because I have to fight you for it in just about every other area these days. Since you learned to crawl, you’ve been testing out a new independent outlook on life, which is described in my baby book as “self-agency” and which seems to boil down to a mission to find and play with, crawl on, or climb up the exact thing in any given room that has the most potential to hurt you. The problem is that you have no depth perception, no ability to judge whether or not your body will fit through a given space, and, as you can see from this picture, no idea what the dining room chairs will taste like once you finally get a mouthful of them.
This month, in various fits of self agency, you have fallen off the couch, slipped backwards in the bathtub, and conked your head on the dining room table, leaving two little bruises on your forehead just in time for your birthday pictures. This is not exactly making me feel like Mother of the Year. But I am told by people who ought to know that you have to start understanding gravity at some point, and this is how it happens. I wish it didn’t have to involve so much falling down, but I actually think that is harder for me than it is for you. You pretty much recover if I offer you a graham cracker, whereas it takes me an hour to get my blood pressure back down after one of your tumbles. Maybe I should try one of those graham crackers.
This month, you have started talking to yourself. I’ve mentioned before how much you babble, but lately it sounds like you’re actually having a conversation. All the inflection is there … your voice goes up and down, you pause in all the right places, you ask questions, and sometimes you even change your voice as if now you are repeating the words of someone else. It’s just that none of it is in English. It’s in baby gibberish. Your favorite non-words right now are “yosh” “dat” and “jish” and you say them so much that we think that you are under the impression that they are actual words. I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but we have no idea what you’re talking about. If you want to get an interpreter in here, that’s fine with us, but in the meantime, we’ll be muddling through with gestures and the few signs you’ve picked up. The words “please”, “eat”, and, oddly enough, “fish” make up your your entire signing lexicon. Not exactly the stuff of great oration. Still, it’s progress.
Among your peers in our circle of friends, you are clearly going to be the last one to walk. I chalk this up to lack of athletic genes from your dad and I, but you are at least starting to show signs of being interested in the process. Right now, this means that you want to spend a lot of time holding onto our hands while you practice walking. It’s one of the few times in my life that I have wished to be shorter, since for me and your very very tall dad, it’s not very comfortable to hold the crouched position required to support you. I find myself torn between wanting you to hurry up and learn to walk and hoping that you take your time. I got a little preview of what life with you walking might be like when we were in Minnesota last week. There was a flight of carpeted stairs. We don’t have stairs in our house. And the stairs at the lake cabin where we were staying looked somewhat dangerous. So of course you were totally in love with …. the stairs! And I was horrified — HORRIFIED– at how quickly you learned to climb them. I stood behind you to act as a buffer while you made your initial attempts and thought “Oh, that’s a pretty complicated move. She probably won’t really get the hang of it until it’s time to go home.” And then, ten minutes later, there we were, halfway up the stairs. I can feel my hair turning gray.
In lieu of stairs, your new task in life is to learn how to climb in and out of the barn animal themed rocking chair Grammy bought you for your birthday. You don’t understand why you can’t just lean forward until you magically aren’t in the chair anymore. I have a feeling gravity is going to catch up with you on that one, too.
Back to your birthday. In the afternoon, we baked you cupcakes, blew up balloons, stripped you down to your diaper and let you go at it. You loved the balloons. You loved the cupcakes until you got freaked out by the stickiness of the icing all over your body and wanted a bath. You loved all the attention you got and the candles and the singing and grandparents talking to you on the phone. It was all about you, and that’s pretty much your favorite kind of shindig.
And then, after we put your sugar-laced self to bed, your daddy and I got dressed up and went out on the town. That’s right, on your birthday, we got a reservation at one of the nicest restaurants in Albuquerque, sat at a beautiful table overlooking the Sandia mountains, and celebrated the fact that we have survived the first year of your life. We intended to go out and have some nice, grown up conversation. But mostly, we talked about you. We marveled at how much you’ve changed since the day we first met you, and how much joy and laughter you have brought us, and everything that we’ve learned this year about you and about each other. And while some of this year has been hard, because change is always hard, we wouldn’t change anything about where we are now.
So as I reach the end of a whole year of writing you these letters, I hope that one day you will read them and know how much we love you. When I think back to one year ago today, it isn’t being in labor that I remember the most, although that was certainly an experience. The strongest memory I have of that day is this:
After you were born and your daddy had gone home to get some sleep because the hospital was so full he couldn’t stay with us, I got settled into my bed and the nurse who was taking care of us brought you to me so that I could feed you. She left us alone, and it was the first quiet moment I could remember in the last 24 hours. It was the middle of the night, probably actually early in the morning by this time, and I was totally exhausted, but I could finally look at you as much as I wanted to. I have been a blessed person all my life, Kate. God has been good to me in so many ways, most of them ways that I take for granted. But sitting there in the first hours of your life, I knew that God had turned to me out of everyone in the world and blessed me with the specific, unique, beautiful little person who I was holding in my arms. Since then all the parts of the Bible that talk about how God loves us as His children have seemed so much more personal to me. That’s not a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of love. That’s a love that knows your name. I hope you never forget that.
Happy first birthday.
I love you,
Mommy
Photo credit, Rebecca Tredway.
Tags: Home Refinance
