Law Students

53 weeks

You are ONE. People call newborns "little bundles of joy," but that term describes you much better right now. You are always ready to laugh, play, and explore. I keep reading toddler books that talk about how to deal with your difficult child. You're about as far from a difficult child as you can get.

You have learned so much in the past few months. A brief sampling:

* You've learned the concepts of "on" and "off." You love to turn the lights on and off, and I taught you how turn your electronic toys on so I can turn them off when you're not using them.

* You learned how to take off your mittens by pulling one off with your teeth and then using the free hand to get the other one off. Now whenever we go anywhere in the stroller, within the first two minutes I see a mitten being tossed over the side. I always notice and pick them up again. But it doesn't do either of us much good.

* You say "Moo moo" when we sing "Old MacDonald," and "Vroom" when you see a car. (You also say "vroom" while you push a toy car along the floor, which cracks me up. I don't know where you learned it but it's such a classic little boy thing to do.) You make the sign for "drink" when you're thirsty and "food" if you're really hungry. When we say, "Where are your ears?" or "Where is the cat?" you point to it.

* You can put your toy boat together now instead of just taking it apart.

* You figured out that a pen has a cap that comes off, much to our chagrin. When you see me writing, sometimes you grab a pen and scribble on the page too (but we keep the cap on).

* You have developed a love for music. I pulled out a mini-xylophone -- not a baby one, but one that came from a wind chime shop and has small round bars instead of wide flat ones -- and at first you poked it with the stick end of the mallet, but by the time Daddy came home you were playing real notes.

* When you hear the trucks go by, you want to run to the window to see. I used to think we should live on a quieter street, but you have so much fun looking out the window at all the cars and trucks and people going by. When we go to your grandparents' houses in the suburbs, there's nothing to see.

For your first birthday party, we had about fifty people crammed into Nonna's tiny house. All to see you! You're lucky to have such a nice, big family. Mommy didn't have that growing up because our family was in India. We'll take you there one day to meet everyone.

You got an appalling amount of electronic toys for your first birthday. What happened to good old blocks? I let you have one and I'm holding on to one more for a rainy day, but the rest are going to better homes. You'll thank me in twenty years.

You're supposed to start walking and talking soon, according to the books and Dr. Kerbel. That will be exciting. I can already see it starting to happen. It's starting to get warm and if you can walk when the weather's nice, we can have lots of fun at the park. This is the last summer I'll have time off, so we have to take advantage of it! We'll go to the zoo and to the Children's Museum and we'll play all afternoon and take walks in the morning. I can't wait.

Love,
Mommy

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).