Canadian Rhapsody: one

Today, my sweet, beautiful girl, you turn one.

And I know you don’t know what that means just yet, but to your mama it means the world. I have had you as mine for 365 days (plus 285 days in my belly) and I can’t believe I have been so completely and utterly blessed.

You bring such joy and meaning to your Daddy and I’s life, and EVERY time you smile it is sure to improve a bad day. Your Daddy can’t wait to come home every night to see you and is extra happy that you’ve started standing at the front door at that time of day.

Today we celebrated all of the wonderful things you have brought to our life and at your party yesterday, we welcomed all of our family and friends to celebrate with us.

You did so well at your birthday party, even though you didn’t have ANY naps until 4pm, and you were cuddled and loved by a million and one people. You were a rock star.

You’re still content to crawl everywhere instead of walking, and in fact you no prefer crawling to cruising along the couch and standing to play with things. Mama’s going to have to start going for walks with you just to encourage you to continue to strengthen those muscles!

I’ll share more about all of the special details of your birthday soon, but today I just want to sit and remember you.

You were born at 9:49 pm and you came into the world with your fist by your head, ready to stick it out and conquer the world. Your first sounds (more like yelling at us for removing you from your warm cocoon actually) were blissful to our ears, and signalled to us that you were as perfect as could be physically.

We were blessed with a petite little 6lb 10z girl, even though you were 5 days over due, but for someone so small, you’ve always captured a lot of attention.

The newborn stage seemed to pass by quickly for you, as you were packing on 2.5lbs a month and had reached 12lbs by your 2 month shots. It’s no surprise you were such a little porker when you were eating every 2-3 hours for the first 6 months of life.

You’ve always been a little ahead of the curve in your understanding of concepts, linguistically, and in understanding how those important toys work, but my girl? You’ve taken your sweet time with those physical developments.

Rolling? Not til 4 months and even after that you were never a ‘roller’.
Crawling? This one came even later at 10 months.

Your mama knows you well though. I know you love to watch people and understand how things work, and you’ve been content to sit and watch the world go by your whole life thus far.

Even as a newborn you refused to do much napping in favour of watching sunshine on walls and watching your mama work on her domesticity. Soon enough you were six months old and refusing naps in favour of sitting and playing with your toys. My guess would be that for the past 6 months you’ve averaged about 1.5 hours a day napping and that’s if I’m lucky!

We decided to do the baby led solids route with you and boy are we glad that we did! Not only did I not have to worry about all of that steaming/baking and pureeing, but we also saved money on all of those jars and baby cereals. We waited until you started showing interest and reaching for food and allowed you to have large soft chunks that you could hold in your fist and gnaw on. You got your first two teeth at 6 months which helped you get bites of the food off and into your belly.

It wasn’t too soon before you started eating everything you could get your hands on, and since then there are few things that you have refused (sweet potatoes in any form unless disguised in something else, comes to mind). Sometime soon we will introduce things like honey (waited until now because of the botulism risk) and maybe even seafood.

You love to clap and wave at everyone, and have an ever expanding vocabulary. Your favourite words lately have been puppy, bye bye and yesh (although I’m not sure if the last one is actually any sort of acknowledgement, though to your credit you say it after I ask you questions!).