Disclaimer: Towards the end of this letter, I talk about some thoughtless things people have said to me about an ongoing issue we've had regarding Kate's sleep patterns. Knowing that a lot of you who read my blog have given us great advice on this topic in recent months, I just want to make it clear that you are not the people I am talking about. Mostly, it has been strangers who have had the most outspoken or just plain nosy things to say after they ask if she sleeps through the night and I say "No." Y'all who are part of our real lives have been lovely and supportive, even on the sixteenth or twentieth time I have asked you what you think about a particular approach. Thanks for that.

Dear Kate,

In a week, you will be nine months old, so I am just going to give in an declare that I did, indeed, fail to write an eighth month newsletter, and so I am combining months eight and nine here. I am somewhat comforted by the fact that you can't yet count, and that by the time you read this and realize I skipped a month, I'll probably have humiliated you on your first day of junior high, or been the only mom who insisted on riding in the back seat during driver's education, and that will make this seem like a minor infraction. I hope you'll forgive me.

I know that I have been putting off writing about last month, and now the last two months, because it is overwhelming to try to put on paper everything we've done, and how much you've changed in that relatively brief period of time. So in case I give up trying to capture it halfway through, here is a quick list of the things you do now that you didn't do two months ago:

You wave your hands in the air. Sometime when we were in Mississippi, you started experimenting with this move, but it wasn't until we were seated in the exact middle of a lengthy pew at my parents' church in Hattiesburg during morning worship on Mother's Day that you decided to really show off your new skills. The pastor had his hands raised during part of the prayer, and suddenly you stood up on my lap and put your hands up too. You were so proud of yourself that it was hard to want to make you stop. But you were kind of distracting, waving your arms around like a miniature television evangelist. So I turned you around to face me, and you promptly started doing your previously documented dance routine for the entertainment of the couple seated behind us. This is cute, but I'm not sure if you got the memo: We're Presbyterians, baby. So you're going to have to take it down a notch.
Here we are together on Mother's Day.

You clap. You started doing this during a visit from your Grammy and Grandpa Wachdorf, and I'm a little concerned that it has made you believe you have the power of mind control, because every time you clap even a little, someone drops what they are doing and sings you either "Pattycake" or "If You're Happy and You Know It." And this look comes over your face like you're imagining your life as the star of a reality show called "Baby Kate: Parent Whisperer." Here you are with Grammy and Grandpa.

That walker that I mentioned you could only drive in reverse? Well now you're driving it so well that I'm having to build little barricades in the kitchen to keep you from running into my ankles at high speeds. You love that thing, and your love was only intensified when it dawned on you, about a week ago, that with your new power steering capabilities you could go get the television remotes all by yourself.

You laugh. You play peekaboo. You have learned to throw things. I'm not sure that is a good thing, but you find it entertaining, so as long as you're throwing plastic toys and not valuable china, I don't think we have a problem.

And how could I have waited this long to mention that you finally have a tooth? After faking me out for months -- MONTHS -- you have at last sprouted a little teeny tiny tooth, and you spend a good portion of every day checking it out with your tongue. Maybe it's because of this that you also babble a lot more lately than you have in the past. I don't know what it is, but I'm loving it, because you have such a cute voice. In the week before your tooth finally broke through, you would chew on anything, including the hard plastic flower attached to your walker. It doesn't look very tasty, but you couldn't get enough.

Probably the thing you are most excited about this month is your new-found ability to feed yourself. For a long time, you didn't understand how to open up your fist and put the food in your mouth. You'd just sit there, putting your fist in your mouth, then take it out and look confused when the Cheerio was still in your hand. But then it clicked, and you are a self-feeding wizard. The only unforeseen side effect of this is that you are so enamored with feeding yourself that you are very impatient with foods that I have to feed you with a spoon. If it were up to you, you'd be on the 100 Percent Bread and Cheerios Diet, which I'm not sure would pass muster with our pediatrician. So you might have to put up with me and my pesky spoon a little longer. It's going to be a while before you can handle a steak knife.

So now that I've talked about all the things you can do, I'm going to take a moment to write about the one thing you don't do. At almost nine months old, you still do not sleep through the night, or anything close to it. For a long time, I thought this was my fault, and that somehow I was doing something that was getting in the way of your natural desire and ability to sleep for 12 consecutive hours a night. This is how most baby sleep books make it sound. And I have read a lot of baby sleep books in the last nine months. That fact in itself is notable, because above all else, I hate to read "How To" books. But I haven't had a solid night's sleep in nine months, and around month five, I hit the baby books pretty hard, looking for some answers. Yet, you still don't sleep through the night in quite the way all those books promise you will if we just do everything the way they say.

I am not going to blog about the combination of steps we've taken recently that have started to show some results, because I don't want the Internet to yell at me. Sleep philosophies, I've discovered, are really controversial, and no matter what you do, someone out in the world of parenting literature stands ready and willing to call you a terrible person for it. But I'm writing about this struggle we've had because these letters will also serve as a record of what this first year of your life was like for me, and I want to remember how frustrating this part was, how inadequate it made me feel, and how little 95 percent of the books I read helped.

I want to remember those things for two reasons. One is so that I can be sympathetic to someone going through the same thing one day. I truly believe that there is some kind of fog that descends on the minds of parents that prevents us from recalling in detail just how hard some of the parts of having a baby really are. And sometimes, when you're in the middle of those hard things, people can't access the memory of what you're going through, even though they went through it themselves. So, with the best of intentions, they say things like "Oh, this is nothing. Wait until she's a teenager. Then you'll have problems." That may be true, but it is not helpful, and I don't ever want to say it to some poor sleep deprived woman.

The other reason I want to remember this is because trying to get you to sleep has taught me what I am pretty sure is a major parenting/life lesson: No matter how much I want there to be a well-defined answer for how to fix any given problem we may face as your parents, the fact is that you are a unique little person, and even if Book X worked for 6,235 babies before you, none of those babies are just like you. In some ways, it's tough for me to embrace that, because it means that there are probably never going to be any easy answers, and that instead, we will go through various incarnations of the same process we've gone through with sleep stuff -- trying something we think might be a good idea, trusting our instincts enough to decide what isn't going to work for us, trying again and then the really hard part, being patient when the results we want don't magically occur.

But at the same time, that lesson also makes me feel really lucky, because it's another reminder that there really is only one of you. And there isn't any other baby I'd rather have, even if you never do sleep 12 hours straight like the babies in all those books.

(But for the record, the offer of $500 in cash in exchange for six to seven hours of sleep at a stretch still stands, at least until I finish reading this book on how to teach you to fix yourself a sandwich and read a good book when you wake up in the middle of the night.)

I love you,
Mommy