Eleven Months

Dear Miss Skye,

Happy eleven-month-iversary!  Or, as I like to call it, holy sh*t, my baby is growing up too damn fast.  Please cover your ears, which stick out exactly like mine, whenever I utter this expletive-laden cry.  I suspect I will be exclaiming it many times the next, oh, forty or so years.  And, yes, I expect you to cover your ears each and every time.

Over the past month, you’ve developed a sassy attitude.  Or, as your Grandma Kirby likes to call it, karma.  Whenever your father and I try to show you how to do something, even something as simple as the proper way to use a sippy cup, you cry bloody murder.  Perhaps that’s just your way of telling us you’d rather google it.  You also refuse to eat most solid foods unless it comes from your own hands, with the exception of oatmeal — a culinary delight so delicious, evidently, that it causes you to snort at the very sight of it.  You are still getting the hang of feeding finger foods to yourself, so you have become quite popular with birds around Los Angeles.  Whenever the pigeons see us coming at Johnny Rockets, they pull up a chair on the patio and wait for the feast to fall their way on the ground.

And whenever the wait staff sees us and Miss ButterFingers coming, they rush to put up the “CLOSED” sign.  Weird.

Your sassiness amuses me, as does your nonstop chatter.  Other than “DaDa,” “MomMom” and “KittyCat,” I have no clue what you’re babbling about, but I believe your language skills will be of great use should NASA need to communicate with extraterrestrial beings.  One of your new, non-verbal ways of communicating is pointing at things excitedly.  Trees!  Lights!  Cats!  SpongeBob!  Air!  You smile with wonder and look at me to make sure that I, too, am taking in every single amazing detail of our surroundings.  And I am.  I am seeing things through your eyes, rediscovering the world as if just arriving here for the very first time.  It is awesome.

Except for SpongeBob.  Even through the eyes of rediscovery, I simply can’t trust anybody who smiles that much.

You’re not walking yet, Miss Skye, but you sure are “cruising” like nobody’s business (cruising as in getting around with support, not cruising as in what Jon Gosselin does at college bars) — standing up with the sofa, cruising to the chair, bending down to pick up a block, reaching over to me and… laying your head on my chest.  Still a shameless mama’s girl — only a phase, I’m sure, so I eat it up as voraciously as you eat a bowl of oatmeal — you not only reach for me every time I’m in the same room, but you also like to cuddle with me, often throwing your arms around my body and parking your head on my shoulder for minutes on end.  Sometimes you are so overcome that you squeal like a chipmunk on helium and grab my face, pulling it close to yours as you coo and giggle.  It’s at moments like these that I think…

Huh.  Giving up margaritas and salmon sushi for nine months really WAS worth it.

Eleven months after the nurse laid your wrinkly body on my chest for the first time, your father and I still gaze at you with the same wonder you gaze at the pipes on the ceiling in the garage.  “We are so lucky,” one of us is always marveling.

Now, if we could just work on using that sippy cup.  And slowing down this whole growing-up nonsense.  And developing a more refined cartoon palate.

With heaps of love and oatmeal,

MomMom