This delicious milk-filled morsel is now a toddler. How the hell did that happen? And I know it sounds insanely trite but seriously, how could I possibly be so inordinately lucky?
Its just a bittersweet moment, your youngest child's first birthday and it's so amazing to me how universal that it -- the joy and relief that your child is growing older and the sadness that they are too, the nostaglia for a time that is barely even in the past yet. When I try to remember ever feeling that intense blend of feeling in my pre-life kids, I can't recall ever experiencing that, really the equals parts bitter and sweet.
Well, maybe not equal. Because as much as I love babies in general, and my Terza in particular, I do not love sleepless newborn nights and having to support their tiny little heads and wondering if breastfeeding is going well. And as much as I love snuggling with a tiny, swaddled baby, I love even more hearing my kids learn to find their voice, to tell me what they're feeling and thinking (Ok, not all the time, they do have a tendency to overdo it, logorrhea, I wonder where that shit comes form, but still). I love, perhaps more than anything, to discover what kind of an individual my child is -- to see the ways they are like me and their Daddy and their siblings and the ways they are so different, so particularly them.
A very happy birthday to my baby girl. As of a few days ago, when she took her first uninterrupted series of steps, she is a bona fide toddler.
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