One Year

My wonderful little boy,

It seems wholly impossible that it has been a year since you came into our lives. As cliched as it is, it feels like just yesterday that you were born, but I can't really remember our life without you. In that year you have gone from being a helpless newborn to being a fiercely determined, rambunctious little boy. I have loved every minute of being your mom, even the minutes where you bit hard enough to draw blood or screamed for no reason or threw all your food on the floor for the dog. Every. Minute. They have been the best 525,600 minutes of my life.

This month has been full of fun. You rediscovered books -- and remembered that they are not just for eating. You love to flip the pages and look at the pictures. You love your big picture books and Beep Beep Peekaboo and Fuzzy Fuzzy Fuzzy. You also love Alligator Alphabet, requesting it be read MANY TIMES after almost every nap -- you see the painting on the wall and want to touch the animals (mainly the yak and the zebra), so we read the book instead. Unsurprisingly, your first word was book. And even less surprisingly, your second was dog. You continue to be slightly obsessed with the dog.

You are also really into your walking toys. You love walking, but you can't quite do it on your own yet, so you spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time pushing your truck across the room, walking around it to get to the other side, then pushing it back. It was a happy day in our house when you discovered that you could walk to the other side to push it back, ending the days of sitting down and crying. You also enjoy walking the truck to the airplane, and the airplane to the giraffe, or any of them to a piece of furniture that you can cruise along to get to the next thing, whether it be another walking toy, another piece of furniture, the exersaucer (you love being able to walk around it and check out the toys from the outside), your music table, or your workbench. I think you have too many toys.


This month you also took your first step, down at Grandma Ps beach house, where we spent Labor Day with Papa and Grandma P and your cousins and your uncles and aunt. I don't think the step was on purpose -- you let go, took one step, and fell down -- but you did do it. While there, you also took your first dip in the Atlantic. It was definitely more successful than the Pacific. You liked it so much that, when we were sitting on the beach, you took my hands and walked me back down to the water to go back in, wading in up to your chest and laughing away. I am so glad you have decided you like the water. Now that you bathe in the big boy bathtub and spent time in a pool both at our house and at daycare, maybe it seems more familiar. Or maybe you just knew that this was your ocean. I'm happy either way.

I'm sorry that you had to wake up in the morning on your first birthday in a pack n play in a hotel room, but daddy's cousin got married and we had to go. You did get to celebrate with a belgian waffle, followed by your first haircut (it was getting a bit shaggy around the ears), thanks to Grandma. We spent the evening at Fenway Park, where you got to see your name on the scoreboard, along with birthday wishes from your dad and me. You also got to see the Red Sox win for the sixth time this year -- this time from excellent seats on the first base line. You held up a sign telling everyone it was your birthday, which everyone in our section loved but no one on TV saw. You were on TV, though -- in the background for every left-handed batter but not with the sign. We'll save it -- you have a lot of birthdays ahead of you.

My sweetpea, my munchkin, my big guy, my baby boy. I love you with all my heart, on this, your first birthday, and for every day before and every day yet to come.

Mommy