He is one today. One! Year! Old! And before I go into how amazing that is, can I just say, thank God he is not an infant anymore.
Thank God. We sat down the other night for nighttime cuddles and I was totally burnt (Himself is sick, so I'd been on baby duty solo) and I put on one of our baby instructional videos from when he was born, so he could see the babies and we could talk about babies and when he was a baby. And every time they showed a shot of an infant crying,
I started to cry, and I remembered how sad and out of control I was and how he cried all the time.
No nostalgia here, no sir. Talk to me when he is thirteen and I may sing you a different tune, but right now, I am all about him growing up. It is awesome.
All kinds of new and exciting things have happened in the last month. He's developed several interesting new eating habits. He likes to chew things up and then lean over and spit them out on the floor for the dogs, or into the catchment area on his bib. We totally grossed out my friend A when we went to visit - he made his usual gorp of half-chewed foodstuffs in his bib area at breakfast, which freaked her out enough to begin with, and then when he'd finished everything in front of him, he started rummaging around in the bib for more! A has Food Issues anyway, and her face, oh my god, I hurt myself laughing. A, I took this picture of Squid for you, at dim sum last week.
He's also attached himself to his bottle like a lot of kids attach themselves to a blankie or bear or other object. He crawls around with it hanging out of his mouth - look, Ma! no hands! - and sucks at it obsessively, even when it is empty. Weirdo. I don't particularly care, except when I have to take it away to fill it and he starts to howl bloody murder. Then I wish he'd picked something less utilitarian.
We both had sniffles for the first couple of weeks of February, which had ups and downs - sadly, it prevented us from going into the City to celebrate the arrival of Baby Myles with our friends D and M, because we didn't want to spread the plague. But awesomely, it led to the Squid inventing a game
all by himself! One day he grabbed a tissue, and before I could take it away, he held it up to my nose. I made a fake "HOOONK" and he laughed and laughed and laughed and held it up to my nose again! Death by cute, I tell you. Of course, the game evolved over time, and this morning he held a square plastic toy up to my nose and waited for me to honk, and then giggled, but that's okay. It's pretty exciting that he came up with that all by himself! He's gotten much better at peek-a-boo, too, and at chasing us around the house.
I keep forgetting he can't quite walk yet, he stands and cruises the furniture so well. It's just a matter of time, at the rate he's going. He's teetering on the edge of "first word", too - he's held up a carrot twice and said "Care!" and says "Daw!" at the dogs a lot, but he says "Dah!" at a lot of things, so I can't tell if there's intent to name there or not. And I can't get him to repeat "Care!" at any carrot (I'm more likely to get "nuh nuh nuh!") so I'm counting it a fluke, like the time he said "nanana" for banana and hasn't said it since. I'm thinking "Dog" is probably going to take the field, but you never can tell. Woo, language!
He still and always looks incredibly like his Daddy, but he has my (fine, thin, unruly) hair, my long pointy tongue, and my father's broad forehead. It's nice to be able to look at him and see bits of me, too, though the poor kid really didn't deserve that hair - it's a curse. He's going to have a cousin (auntie status YAY!) in about seven months, so I'm looking forward to seeing whether my sister-in-law's genes will dominate there as well, or if they'll get a totally different combination. I'm so excited for the Squid to have a cousin near his age, and I hope we'll be able to see them a lot once they move to D.C., which is a place I always enjoy visiting.
He's been teething - four more teeth have broken ground this month - and so some days are whinier than others. Me to baby: "Seriously, little dude, if you ever figure out how whining about it helps, let me know, because it would justify a lot of my life." But mostly, he's a cheerful, independent, delightful fellow. It's weird, though, how baby thought processes work. I mean, he looks like a little person, right? A sort of mini-kid. And we all remember being kids, but what I didn't really get before he came along was that we all remember being, like, five or six or seven, not one. Or two.
There's no sense of the future - or the past, for that matter. No ability to distinguish between environmental constraints and choice. No empathy, no logic, no awareness of other people, no
understanding. He's still trying to figure out how to get his food from plate to mouth and how to work his legs - broader, less immediate concepts like "later" and "other" and "can't" just don't compute. All he knows when I take his empty bottle to fill it or he is being strapped into his carseat to go somewhere fun is that Things Are Not As He Wants Them, not that things are in the process of getting better. He wants things that are mutually exclusive to happen simultaneously - to sleep and to play, to be in mama's arms and on the floor, to drink his bottle and crawl around.
So I catch myself being frustrated with him for not understanding these things. He's not going to understand them for a long time, and I am not sure how to help myself remember that in the kneejerk frustrations of the moment. It's hard! And I'm sure it's hard for him, too. "Living in the moment" is something people valorize, but I think that if you actually had to? It would be pretty difficult.
The Fan Club (my parents) are coming tonight to celebrate, and we might go to the zoo or out to breakfast tomorrow morning. Because Squid! Is! One!
