Kate and I are home from our Minnesota adventure. No time to do is justice on the blog right now, as Kate's Grammy Wachdorf is in town and life is busy, but Rebecca, my friend of View from the Prarie Box fame, has a great Flickr stream of pictures from our weekend.

And to continue my blog plagiarizing, I will also link to this post from Charity's blog highlighting one of her favorite conversational moments.

As I said when we were eating Oreos and drinking red wine the first night at the cabin, I love this weekend. I recently read a poem on someone else's blog that reminds me of all the late night conversations I have had with these girls over the years. So now I've stolen three people's work.

The Good Nights

by Joseph Mills

On the good nights
when the bottle’s empty
we always want
just a little more,
half a glass,
a few sips,
a taste.
We know
this desire
can be dangerous
to pursue,
that it can make
mornings difficult,
so usually we
brush our teeth
let the dog in,
lock the doors,
but sometimes,
even as we say
We really should
get ready for bed,
instead of loading
the dishwasher
we will search
for the corkscrew,
all the while
shaking our heads
in wonder
at this willingness
to ignore the clocks
and the fact we have
to work tomorrow,
this irresponsibility,
this evidence
even after all these years
of the unquenchable desire
for each other’s company.

Dear Kate,

Today you are one year old. You don't know this, because we celebrated yesterday. It was more convenient for us, and we have that kind of control over your life until you learn to count and read a calendar. I like to brag about that control because I have to fight you for it in just about every other area these days. Since you learned to crawl, you've been testing out a new independent outlook on life, which is described in my baby book as "self-agency" and which seems to boil down to a mission to find and play with, crawl on, or climb up the exact thing in any given room that has the most potential to hurt you. The problem is that you have no depth perception, no ability to judge whether or not your body will fit through a given space, and, as you can see from this picture, no idea what the dining room chairs will taste like once you finally get a mouthful of them.

This month, in various fits of self agency, you have fallen off the couch, slipped backwards in the bathtub, and conked your head on the dining room table, leaving two little bruises on your forehead just in time for your birthday pictures. This is not exactly making me feel like Mother of the Year. But I am told by people who ought to know that you have to start understanding gravity at some point, and this is how it happens. I wish it didn't have to involve so much falling down, but I actually think that is harder for me than it is for you. You pretty much recover if I offer you a graham cracker, whereas it takes me an hour to get my blood pressure back down after one of your tumbles. Maybe I should try one of those graham crackers.

This month, you have started talking to yourself. I've mentioned before how much you babble, but lately it sounds like you're actually having a conversation. All the inflection is there ... your voice goes up and down, you pause in all the right places, you ask questions, and sometimes you even change your voice as if now you are repeating the words of someone else. It's just that none of it is in English. It's in baby gibberish. Your favorite non-words right now are "yosh" "dat" and "jish" and you say them so much that we think that you are under the impression that they are actual words. I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but we have no idea what you're talking about. If you want to get an interpreter in here, that's fine with us, but in the meantime, we'll be muddling through with gestures and the few signs you've picked up. The words "please", "eat", and, oddly enough, "fish" make up your your entire signing lexicon. Not exactly the stuff of great oration. Still, it's progress.

Among your peers in our circle of friends, you are clearly going to be the last one to walk. I chalk this up to lack of athletic genes from your dad and I, but you are at least starting to show signs of being interested in the process. Right now, this means that you want to spend a lot of time holding onto our hands while you practice walking. It's one of the few times in my life that I have wished to be shorter, since for me and your very very tall dad, it's not very comfortable to hold the crouched position required to support you. I find myself torn between wanting you to hurry up and learn to walk and hoping that you take your time. I got a little preview of what life with you walking might be like when we were in Minnesota last week. There was a flight of carpeted stairs. We don't have stairs in our house. And the stairs at the lake cabin where we were staying looked somewhat dangerous. So of course you were totally in love with .... the stairs! And I was horrified -- HORRIFIED-- at how quickly you learned to climb them. I stood behind you to act as a buffer while you made your initial attempts and thought "Oh, that's a pretty complicated move. She probably won't really get the hang of it until it's time to go home." And then, ten minutes later, there we were, halfway up the stairs. I can feel my hair turning gray.

In lieu of stairs, your new task in life is to learn how to climb in and out of the barn animal themed rocking chair Grammy bought you for your birthday. You don't understand why you can't just lean forward until you magically aren't in the chair anymore. I have a feeling gravity is going to catch up with you on that one, too.

Back to your birthday. In the afternoon, we baked you cupcakes, blew up balloons, stripped you down to your diaper and let you go at it. You loved the balloons. You loved the cupcakes until you got freaked out by the stickiness of the icing all over your body and wanted a bath. You loved all the attention you got and the candles and the singing and grandparents talking to you on the phone. It was all about you, and that's pretty much your favorite kind of shindig.

And then, after we put your sugar-laced self to bed, your daddy and I got dressed up and went out on the town. That's right, on your birthday, we got a reservation at one of the nicest restaurants in Albuquerque, sat at a beautiful table overlooking the Sandia mountains, and celebrated the fact that we have survived the first year of your life. We intended to go out and have some nice, grown up conversation. But mostly, we talked about you. We marveled at how much you've changed since the day we first met you, and how much joy and laughter you have brought us, and everything that we've learned this year about you and about each other. And while some of this year has been hard, because change is always hard, we wouldn't change anything about where we are now.

So as I reach the end of a whole year of writing you these letters, I hope that one day you will read them and know how much we love you. When I think back to one year ago today, it isn't being in labor that I remember the most, although that was certainly an experience. The strongest memory I have of that day is this:

After you were born and your daddy had gone home to get some sleep because the hospital was so full he couldn't stay with us, I got settled into my bed and the nurse who was taking care of us brought you to me so that I could feed you. She left us alone, and it was the first quiet moment I could remember in the last 24 hours. It was the middle of the night, probably actually early in the morning by this time, and I was totally exhausted, but I could finally look at you as much as I wanted to. I have been a blessed person all my life, Kate. God has been good to me in so many ways, most of them ways that I take for granted. But sitting there in the first hours of your life, I knew that God had turned to me out of everyone in the world and blessed me with the specific, unique, beautiful little person who I was holding in my arms. Since then all the parts of the Bible that talk about how God loves us as His children have seemed so much more personal to me. That's not a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of love. That's a love that knows your name. I hope you never forget that.

Happy first birthday.

I love you,

Mommy

Photo credit, Rebecca Tredway.

This is a somewhat cut down video of Kate's birthday festivities. First, a few production notes: The awful sound you are hearing is me, Dan, Dan's mom and my mom (via speaker phone) attempting to sing Happy Birthday to Kate. We got out of sync with one another a couple of times, but since it's Kate's first birthday, she doesn't know what the song is supposed to sound like yet, and I figure we can practice up for a better sophomore effort next year. I then stayed on the phone to narrate things for my mom, so you also have to listen to that. Sorry.

We edited down the total video time and now the film reflects a sped-up version of the process Kate went through in order to cover herself completely up to the elbows in cake and icing. My favorite part is at the end when she gets totally disgusted with the stickiness and starts trying to wipe it off. Yes, I like to put my child in awkward positions and then laugh at her. That's the kind of sympathetic mother I am. Enjoy.

It's Sunday morning, and I am home from church with Kate, who is sick with a cold. I was up and down all night because Kate didn't sleep very well at all, so this morning, Dan very kindly got up with her and took care of feeding her breakfast and getting her dressed so that I could get a little more sleep. At first, Dan thought Kate was well enough to go to church, and accordingly, he had dressed her in the little outfit I had picked out for her, a green onesie under a denim jumper. But as the morning progressed, he decided she really wasn't feeling well, so he took the dress off of her, put her down for her nap and then left for church. When I got her up from her nap, I got my first look at Dan's baby-dressing work from the morning. I would give him an A for effort, but I might have to deduct some points for the fact that the onesie is on backwards. Maybe he didn't see the tags sticking out.

I am actually a little bit sad that Kate didn't go to church like this, because I would have liked to know how long it took for one of the other moms to notice the mistake. Notice how I say "one of the moms" instead of "one of the dads." I probably could have just posted this picture, and asked people to tell me what was wrong with it in the comments section. I imagine the women would have immediately noticed the backwards shirt. And the men would be like "Well, there's no football team logo on that shirt, but otherwise, I think she looks ready for church."

For Kate's birthday, Dan and I had talked about buying her a little toy piano, and we may still do that. But in the days leading up to her birthday, she became obsessed with holding onto our fingers while she practices walking. This is fine, but as I noted in her one year letter, we're both pretty tall, and it's hard to stoop over like that for long periods of time. Thus, we changed our gift-giving plans and bought her this little push-toy that lets her stand up and walk forward while holding on to the handle. Because we're lazy parents, and if they make a piece of brightly-colored plastic to do a job that we would otherwise have to do, we will buy it. OK, not really, but sometimes I think the people who market baby products spy on me in my home.

That said, she loves this thing. She's still trying to figure out how to turn it around, so when she runs into a piece of furniture or a wall, she gets pretty mad until one of us comes and arranges for her to have another swath of unobstructed road to travel, but when she's tooling around behind it, she thinks she is so cool.

It has toys attached to the front. So sometimes she has to stop and play with those.

Once she's able to walk, it collapses down into a little car riding toy. We've told her to enjoy it, because it's the only car we're ever going to buy for her.

Our friend Liz came to see us this week, and so I've been away from the computer, seeing the sights of New Mexico. Isn't it interesting how you forget what's in your own city and state until you start showing someone else around? It helps that all the driving to Santa Fe and around Albuquerque was done with Liz in the car, and Liz makes me laugh, which is my favorite way to pass the time. So here are a few pictures from our adventures, and I'd also like to insert a brief commercial here for those of your considering a trip to New Mexico: Come on out! Dan will pick you up at the airport. I will show you the sights. Kate and I are unemployed and available to go to Santa Fe at a moment's notice. I will cook you dinner. I will even take Kate's pack n play out of the guest room and let you have the whole thing to yourself. I will do all of this out of sheer relief at not having had to get on an airplane with a baby in order to visit with you. Thanks to the airline industry's new customer service approach (Motto: "If we could charge you $25 for oxygen on the plane, we totally would.") I am getting to the point where I would pay large sums of money NOT to get on a plane.So please consider the Land of Enchantment next time you are planning a vacation. Maybe I'll give you the money I would have spent on a plane ticket. End commercial.

Here are Liz, Kate and I on the top of Sandia Peak. We rode the tram up, and I couldn't tell if Kate really like the ride or was really really scared, because she kept hanging on to the rail in front of the tram car windows like she was either just really taken with it or was trying to reassure herself that she wasn't going to fall.

With Liz checking out the trees changing colors on the backside of the peak.

In Santa Fe, we had gelato, and Kate cried if I didn't get another bite of it into her mouth quickly enough. Child after my own heart.

We sat on the square downtown and watched hippies and elderly folks in town with guided tour bus groups. Oddly no one was protesting anything that day, which may mark the first time I've been in Santa Fe without seeing someone marching in protest of the war/animal abuse/purple shirts on Thursdays or whatever sorts of things you start protesting when you run out of actual injustices. Someone did talk to me about the environment, but they didn't have any signs and were really nice, so I didn't mind. And Kate enjoyed her pita bread picnic.

Actually, the most intrusive thing that happened during our travels wasn't in Santa Fe, World Capital of Sign-Waving Concerned Citizens, but in Albuquerque, where, during an otherwise unremarkable lunch at Einstein Bros. Bagel Co., this guy came up to Kate, grabbed her toy monkey, and started making it kiss her face. Which might have been cute for about 30 seconds, but the guy just kept doing this for about five minutes. I didn't know what to do. Kate handled it pretty well, but she kept giving Liz and I these looks like "Seriously? Is this guy nuts? And is he going to give me back my monkey, or what?" I really think he was trying to be nice, and so I tried really hard not to laugh until we got out of the restaurant, but it was such a weird thing to do. So when you come for your visit to Albuquerque, we won't go to lunch there. Promise.

A couple of days ago, I went to look for Kate in the back of the house because I hadn't seen her for all of 90 seconds and, as every mom knows, that's usually not a good thing. As I walked down the hall, I heard her in her room, chattering away, and figured she was just in there playing. But when I looked, she was sitting with a book in her lap from her bookshelf "reading" out loud to herself. Since then I've been trying to catch her on tape, and tonight I finally got it. The video is a bit shaky because if Kate sees the video camera, she will immediately stop whatever she's doing and start trying to grab it so she can put it in her mouth, so I have to sneak up on her if I want to tape her doing something. This I filmed by crouching down in the hall outside her room and holding the camera just around the door frame. I imagine this is what filming a nature documentary about a very skittish sort of bird is like. Perhaps that can be my second career.

It makes me laugh how she's so authoritative with her tone, like she is completely confident she is reading the book, and how at some parts she changes her tone of voice like we do when we read to her. I have to admit, as a reader, it makes me happy to see her enjoying books. My dream of an in-home book club is one step closer to reality, people!