Dear Moe (13 Months)

Dear, darling boy, it’s hard to believe its only been one month since my last letter. So much has happened that I’m not even sure where to begin.

Well, let’s start with your birthday party. We had some wonderful people here to celebrate with you. We found a great bakery that specializes in egg-free cupcakes and we were really pleased with how delicious they were. You were, too! You ate your first cupcake with great gusto, and behaved very well for a little boy who was hopped up on sugar and who hadn’t napped. I was proud of you.



You continue to make great strides in your physical abilities. When I wrote your last letter, you had just figured out how to climb one or two stairs. That lasted about a day and a half. You very quickly figured out how to climb the whole flight. You are so pleased with yourself - you laugh and smile and stick your tongue out in glee while you work your way up. You were less impressed when we installed a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs.

You are free-standing all over the place. You cruise the walls, the furniture, and anything you can get your hands on. And you finally discovered your walker! You love roaring around the main floor - you became very adept very quickly (within a day or two you went from a sort of drunken stagger to moving with a great deal of control) and I’ve even caught you driving with only one hand. It won’t be long before you walk. I’m even willing to bet that it will happen before I write your next letter.



And my darling, it finally happened. Just a few days after your first birthday, you got your very first tooth. It’s slightly to the left on the bottom jaw, and boy did you ever work hard for it. Your little puffs go “crunch crunch” now when you eat them! I’m sure more will come in soon - you are still drooling like a St. Bernard. Some days you go through a bib an hour.

You’re also starting to vary how much sleep you need. Some days you only end up taking one nap, other days you still want two. Right now two seems to still be the trend, so we’ll keep that schedule until you let us know that it’s time to change it.

You are such an affectionate little boy, Moe. You love giving hugs and cuddles - both to the people you love and to your dear Saskatchewan Bear. There are other stuffies you’ll hug, like Humphrey the Camel, but no one compares to Saskatchewan. It’s heartwarming to watch you.

You are fiercely independent. You increasingly don’t want help with things and strive to do them yourself. You always impress me with your ability to quickly get over your tears after a fall or a bump. You got your 12-month vaccine in your arm this time, and didn’t cry at all. You just sort of yelped indignantly, but got over it very quickly.

You love finding little hidey-holes for your toys - in the couch, under the furniture, or tucked behind things. What stuns me is that you remember where you hide everything! You can identify a lot of your toy fruit and vegetables - if I ask you to pull a certain one out of the bin, you can. You still love to take off your socks, but now you try and put them back on. It’s adorable - you sort of place them over your feet and pat them as though you’re trying to get them to stick to your feet. Another thing that you are able to do, and which we are asking you to do daily, is to put things in the laundry hamper in the living room. You are able to crawl to it while carrying a dirty bib or some socks, and place them in the hamper. Daddy calls you our little “hamper monkey”.

We have a number of music cues throughout the day. We sing a song when we brush your teeth (or tooth, I guess, since you just have one). We also have a bathtime song, and you’ve had naptime music and bedtime music for a long time now. You love to hear us sing, and sometimes sing along. You roll your hands (the action for the “Roly Poly” song from playgroup) to ask for a song. We sing Old MacDonald and look at your farm animals, we sing through meals, and we sing in the car. Also, you love to dance to any music you hear.

You haven’t found your words yet - in fact, you’ve gotten increasingly screechy in the last month. But you can now say “mamamama” consistently, and you seem to be talking about me when you say it, which is pretty awesome.

You got some lovely toys for your birthday, and particularly love your new keyboard, your farm animal puzzle and your Bubble Wash. You also got a red wagon from your Grandma and today we took it for its inaugural trip. I think we’re going to have some great times with that wagon this summer!

Our goal has always been to raise a little person who loves reading, and you’re off to a great start. We read books together every day - I’ll choose three and you decide how many of them we’ll read and in which order. Usually we read them all. You were so enamoured with the book Heads by Matthew Van Fleet. It’s a great touch-and-feel book with pull tabs and textures. You especially loved the burping hippo - you make the burping noise, which is hilarious. But one day when you were reading it with Daddy and got a bit too excited and ripped that poor hippo’s head off. You were stunned, and tried to fix it right away. You pressed the hippo head onto the page, trying to get it to stick. You tried it on a number of different pages before you seemed to understand what had happened. I’ve since fixed the hippo head, but it’s very fragile. Also, other parts of the book are damaged - not due to your overenthusiasm, but because you read that book four or five times a day for a month or two. So now you’re not as likely to bring us that book to read. But I suspect Daddy may get you another copy - or a copy of its companion, Tails. Other books you love right now include Where’s My Sweetie Pie?, My Nose, My Toes and Me, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

You pretty much won’t eat jarred entrees any more. You tasted Daddy’s Lamb Tikka Masaala, and that was it. You eat all kinds of finger food - there’s very little you can’t eat, as long as it doesn’t have eggs in it. We found a great recipe for egg-free pancakes for you, and you loved those. And we confirmed that you can eat chicken now, so that opens things up quite a bit. Feeding time can still be quite challenging - it can turn into a real power struggle. You want to hold the spoon, but you won’t bring it to your mouth. You’d rather use it to get your hands into whatever food is in the bowl. Sometimes I feel like a limp rag at the end of the meal.



The biggest change that has happened in the last month is that I went back to work. My first day was Family Day, the day after your birthday. It was very, very difficult to go from spending all my time with you to only seeing you for a few hours a day. But I try really hard to make those few hours count, and I love spending the whole day with you on weekends. I’ve been working a compressed week, which means I work an extra hour each day and then I get every second Friday off to spend with you. I get up at 5:20am, start work at 7:00am, and get home around 4:45pm. It can get long, but it’s worth it for that extra day with you.

Right now, you spend your weekdays with Granny or Grandma. Daddy takes Wednesdays. Knowing that you’re with people who love you and know your routine has made the transition at bit easier for me.

You have dealt with the transition with your usual flexibility. You stopped sleeping through the night for the first three weeks, but you seem to be getting back into the swing of things. Other than that, and some separation anxiety during that first week or two, you’ve been just fine.

Moe, you are so much fun. Daddy and I can’t get over how much we love to spend time with you. We live to make you laugh and smile, we love watching you figure things out, and it is just such a privilege to share our life with you. Everybody loves you - you’re sweet and fun and easy-going. It’s so fantastic to watch you grow into such a lovely little boy. We love you so much - you’ll never know how much. I don’t even think that we understand how much we love you.

It's Official!

We're calling it. First tooth. Sprouted last week. Breakfast puffs now make a "crunch crunch" noise!

So, How's It Going?

People have been asking me this question a lot lately. I went back to work on Monday. It's Wednesday.

How is it going? Well, I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy the work that I do. But it has been very difficult to go from seeing Moe for every one of his waking moments to spending only 2.5 hours with him in the evening, during which time he needs to be fed and bathed. I miss planning and going on our daily adventures. I miss being there when he wakes up in the morning, and from his nap. I miss the way he crawls over to me to recharge. 

I got home yesterday, and I swear he was miffed at me. I may be projecting. 

I'm not sure what circle of hell this is, but I'll let you know when I figure it out. 

So, how's it going? Not fucking well. 

But I'm a brave little toaster with tons of toaster-bravery experience, and I'll get through this like anything else.

Dear Moe (12 Months)

I’ve kind of been dreading writing this letter, my love, because I didn’t want to make it real. But it’s true. You’re going to be one year old on Sunday. Holy monkey. This year has gone by so very, very quickly.

Before I get into more sentimental musings, let me tell you how far you’ve come in the last month. In the last four weeks alone, you have managed to learn to pull yourself up to standing (and get back down again with grace and style) and cruise the furniture. We’ve caught you free standing for a few seconds here and there. And the other day, you were playing by the stairs and suddenly your feet weren’t on the floor anymore - you’d managed to get up one stair. 




You are the king of the main floor. The whole place is childproofed now - gates at the top of the stairs and in both kitchen entrances. We’ve set up a fantastic play area for you with all kinds of lovely toys. And you go right for the electrical sockets, the laptop and the DVD player.

You are still a very happy little boy, for the most part. You’re taking a real interest in your surroundings. You noticed and love the Peter Ellenshaw postcard in your room - I put it in there one day and you saw it right away when you woke up from your nap. I’m thinking of ordering you a Peter Ellenshaw poster for your room. We finally put up your wall art (you know, almost a year after you were born), and you love it. You like looking at the pictures and at photos on the walls around the house. And a few weeks ago you started something new - you noticed the framed photo of Boo in the living room, and every day you ask to say hello to it. (We bring it down to you and you point at it and say things to him.) You also love your Disney snowglobe - part of getting up from your nap is watching it play a few times.

You still love music - your Daddy has been introducing you to classical music. You love grooving to Vivaldi and Corelli, but aren’t so keen on the Germanics. You enjoy the funk and jazz he plays you, too. And you still adore dancing with us.

Your new favourite thing to do is to crawl all over me while I lie on the floor. You put your little fingers in my belly button, you snuggle up to my belly, and you crawl all over my legs. You still do the “Mommy Recharge” when you play - you’ll just crawl up to me if I’m sitting on the floor or the couch, come for a little snuggle for a moment, and then go back to playing.

We hang our Christmas cards from little festive clothespins on a string along the banister. Over the holidays, you enjoyed looking at the cards so much. We’d take one down for you every day, let you touch it and play with it. But now that the holidays are over, it seemed so bare. So I made you another clothesline for cards - we’ll always have some around, whether they are for Valentine’s Day or Easter or a birthday. Now you know you can always look at your cards.



When we go on our afternoon adventure, and it involves the car, you always smile at me as I look behind me to pull out of the garage. I think you like going out in the afternoons. Sometimes we go to playgroup, or to visit a friend, or to a museum. Or we go run an errand and get some groceries. You always seem to enjoy our adventures, whatever we do.

I’ve been trying to go to the playgroup at the Ontario Early Years Centre as much as possible over the last few weeks. I want you to play with other kids as much as you can. Plus, I want you to already be comfortable there so it’s easy for Granny or Grandma or Daddy to bring you. You don’t currently excel at the circle time, but you’re learning. First, you saw circle time as so convenient because all the good toys were suddenly free. Then, you saw it as your personal time with the educator, and you’d crawl up to her and sit in her lap while she tried to lead the songs. If we keep taking you, you may eventually sit still. Maybe.

You’re a very gentle little boy. You can be trusted with pets, like Zaphod, Murray and Missy Bean. You still need to be supervised, obviously, but you’re so good to them. You pet them gently. You’re also fairly gentle with other kids, but you don’t understand why it’s ok to pull yourself up using Mommy or Daddy but not the 11-month-old at playgroup. And you still go for the eyes. *grin*



You love playing peekaboo around corners in the house. You enjoy being pushed around on your car - it won’t be long before you can use it with the walker setting. You like to sit by your book cupboard, open the door, and choose books to look at. Sometimes we look at them together and sometimes you just want to look at them by yourself.



You still have no teeth. But the teething has escalated - I didn’t think it could, but it has. At one point, you refused to eat. (That has NEVER happened before.) We ended up feeding you little bits of frozen fruit, and that helped. You can feed yourself finger food now! And you love to! It’s wonderful to see you putting puffs, cheerios, cheese, toast bites, bits of mushrooms, grapes, potato and more.

Your nose has been running for more than a week now, you poor thing. It’s made things difficult for you. I thought it was teething related, but it may have been a cold. We brought you to the doctor and she confirmed you had no ear infection or chest congestion, which put my mind at ease. She also noticed that your fingers were in very, very rough shape. Between the eczema and putting your fingers in your mouth, they had become so raw and cracked. We had tried band-aids and polysporin, but apparently that wasn’t the thing to do. She prescribed a cream for them and after just a few days we’ve already noticed a big improvement. That makes us very happy.

She also gave us some recommendations for bath time - we’re to bathe you every day instead of every two days (when possible), keep the baths short and not too hot, and rub oil on you before drying you off. Bath time isn’t the fun time it used to be for you - you hate having your head tipped back to rinse your hair (since you won’t do it of your own accord, we have to force you) and you want to stand up in the tub all the time. But you do love being in the water!

We have a small celebration planned for your birthday, with some of the people who love you best. We’ve invited a few of your friends that have known you since the early Well Baby Clinic days, and your Aunt Natalie will be in town to celebrate with you, too.

Big changes are coming, little dude. I go back to work the day after your birthday. Granny, Grandma, Daddy and I will be taking care of you, with Granny doing the lion’s share. I know you’ll be very happy with this arrangement. After six months, we’ll find you a day care spot where you can play with other kids, too. But I am going to miss you more than I can even describe. So I won’t - not right now. I’ll tell you about that in a separate letter.

Do you have any idea what this past year has meant to us, little man? Your Daddy and I expected that being your parents would be fun. We never dreamed it would be this much fun. You bring joy into our lives every day. We love sharing our life with you. Every day, we tell you how awesome you are. And you are. Even when things are difficult and you’re not having the best time, you’re still amazing. You amaze us with your patience, your sunny disposition, your laid-back attitude and your fantastic laugh.



We say that our family mantra is “We want to be invited back.” And you’ve never let us down - everywhere we bring you, you are well behaved and sweet. It helps that we try to read your signs and leave before things turn ugly. But so far, we’ve always been invited back.

We knew from the moment we first held you in our arms that you would change our lives. We didn’t realize that in the process, we’d become better people. Thank you, we owe you so much.

Sneaky Sock

Moe likes to take his socks off while on the change table. He pulls on the toes until... BADOING! the sock comes off. He especially likes to do this with the "other" foot when I'm putting his socks on, but I digress.

Yesterday, he pulled his socks off and flapped them around while I was changing his diaper. He was super squirmy. He tossed the socks around. I got him all diapered up and dressed, and went to retrieve the socks. I could only find one. My mom was there and she turned the change table upside down, but we only found one sock. Whatever. I put another sock on him and put him down for his nap.

But it bugged me. Where was that second sock? I knew it was driving my mom crazy, too.

Cut to two hours later when a sunny little boy wakes up from his nap. Time to change the diaper again. I open it... and there's a very wet sock in his diaper.

I stared at him incredulously. "Seriously?"

He laughed at me.

Moments of Disbelief

I know how lucky we are. Every day I thank the universe for being so very good to us. But still, I occasionally get hit with moments of total disbelief - moments where my life is just really freaking surreal in how awesome it is and how lucky we are to have Moe. 

Yesterday, when I bought a small pack of birthday candles at the grocery store, I had one of those moments.

Passing Time

When did this tiny little creature...



turn into this boy?