After a long day - which is actually several long days. Baby Kate is here. She was born on 09/08/07 (which is kinda cool) at 9:29pm weighing in at 8 pounds 8 ounces measuring 19 1/2 inches.

Haley and I are doing well but are pretty exhausted. Unfortunatly, this time of year is the time to have a baby. This means Haley had to share a recovery room and I got kicked out and sent home. I'll try to catch some sleep at home and then head back in the morning.

Thanks for everyones continued prayers. Please pray for healing for Haley. Also be in prayer for baby Kate. The nurse said she sounds like she has some liquid in her lungs and needs to "cry it out". Kate never really put up a large fuss after she came out, so she probably just needs to get upset and cry for a bit.

More coming soon.

-dan

Well, after almost 24 hours everyone is doing pretty good. The Doctor said Kate is perfectly healthy and everything looks great. Haley is recovering, and doing better.

Mom and Baby should be home tomorrow.

As a side note - a major milestone was passed in the Wachdorf household. Not just the obvious birth of the baby. But I (Dan) changed my first diaper. I change a Kate diaper BEFORE Haley did. Not only that, I changed a gigantic blow out diaper. Who would of thought a little baby can fill up a diaper so much.

Well, we made it home from the hospital yesterday and survived the first night. Haley's mom "Gam" made it in last night and we are grateful for the help. For now, more pictures. Haley will try to get a real blog entry up soon.

Kate in her home coming outfit.

Kate in her crib.

Kate making a funny face.

Kate making a funnier face.

Kate and "Gam"

Kate stretching

Sleeping Kate

Kate hangin' with her dad on the couch.

More pictures. Still no post from Haley. She promises one soon.

Kate entertaining herself in her chair, given to her by her great Grandma Mimi.

Kate sharing a moment with Haley.

Kate stretching on her "lambi".

A close up.

Kate doing her morning stretches.

Kate listening intently to Dad tell her the story of the Aggies triple overtime victory over Fresno State which occurred on the day she was being born.

Hi, everyone!

It has been so great for me to read all of your love and happiness for us in the comments. Thank you for being so excited for us and so joyful about welcoming out little girl into the world. Every day when we check the blog, we tell Kate we're collecting her fan mail. She's going to have a massive ego if we keep that up, but for now I don't think it's going to her head too much.

Today is almost one week since she was born, and I am starting to feel more like a functioning member of society capable of having coherent thoughts, thanks entirely to the loving care I am receiving from Dan and my mom. Dan has been the absolute model of a wonderful husband and great daddy and has borne with great humor the fact that he now has two crying women in his life. And my mom arrived on Monday with several suitcases, including one packed with ice and Southern food staples like fresh okra and green peanuts for boiling. I may be the only woman in the history of the world to actually gain weight post partum. This means that I also get the benefit of her extensive knowledge of babies, which is considerable, since she did have five of them. Mom and Dan have been feeding me, doing all the shopping and house cleaning and such, and making me take naps when Kate is sleeping, and thanks to them I am recovering in great luxury. Here is the okra, in case you don't believe me.

I have so many thoughts to share that I've been trying to put them all into categories for future posts. One whole post will be about hospitalization. I've been blessed with great health my whole life, and have therefore never been in the hospital before, and while everyone on the staff where Kate was born was just fantastic, I have to say I did not enjoy the whole hospital experience. So that will be one post. Then I have a lot to say about labor and delivery, not to share gory details, but more to relate to you the story of how it came about that in the hours leading up to Kate's birth, we ended up watching a triple overtime Texas A&M football victory against Fresno State while being attended to by a nurse who was, no joke, a Fresno State alumnus, and also checking in periodically with another Texas A&M Aggie whose wife was having a baby down the hall. Our room was football central. When I married an Aggie, I knew football would be part of my life, but I have to say I never thought it would be part of my birth experience. Of course, I might not have found this all so humorous if it weren't for the fact that I had had an epidural by that time and was therefore in a pretty good mood. For the 14 hours preceding the epidural, I was not a big fan of noise. Or people. Or breathing oxygen in and out of my lungs in order to continue living. But that's just me.

For now, the thing that occupies a lot of my mind when I'm not trying to figure out some immediate mommy task like how to work the Diaper Genie is the fact that I am now a mom and that Dan and I are parents. It's not that I didn't know this was coming, but there is something very overwhelming about the reality of it that has caught me off guard at strange moments. When we were checking out of the hospital, there were all of these forms to sign indicating that we understood that we were getting a human baby and we were responsible for her once we left the hospital, etc. Every time I was supposed to sign, there was a line, and under the line, there was the word "Mother." And I thought "Oh my goodness. I am a mother now. I am signing legal documents as a mother. This is so weird." I know that one day soon, it's not going to seem that remarkable to me that I'm a mother, but for now, it's pretty amazing.

There are plenty of things about the last week that I know I will remember for the rest of my life even when I am old and can barely remember my own name, but my favorite memory so far is this: The day that we were discharged from the hospital, my hospital roomate checked out early in the morning. The labor and delivery floor had been extremely busy, and so it was the first time that we had the room all to ourselves. Even the nurses were leaving us alone at that point because there wasn't much left for us to do but final paperwork. So Dan and I got ourselves set up in the two arm chairs in the room, got Kate all wrapped up in blankets and sleeping, put on some music in the room and got out the Calvin and Hobbes comic books we brought to the hospital in case we had a random moment just like this. It's a silly thing, but one of the first things that I loved about Dan when we were dating was that it was so easy to laugh with him. And one of the first things we enjoyed laughing over together was Calvin and Hobbes comic books. So on the day we brought Kate home, we sat in the hospital room and read comic books, and at one point, we were laughing so hard that Kate was bouncing up and down in my arms and I was actually afraid I was going to wake her up. But she just kept sleeping, so I was looking down at her beautiful little face, and holding Dan's hand, our new little family having a good laugh together. And I thought "This is the happiest moment of my whole life."

It's true that my brain is currently controlled by lethal amounts of post-baby hormones and therefore, my perspective on the world is perhaps a bit intense at any given moment of sadness or happiness. But the thing is, I have had that exact same thought again at least once every day that has come after that one, even on the days when I've been overwhelmed and tired and scared of all the things I don't know about being a mom. So while every day I realize again just how unalterably our lives have changed because Kate is here, that doesn't scare me like I thought it would when I used to think about having a baby and how it would change our lives. Instead it feels like we've traded in one life full of love and blessings for a new life that somehow, inexplicably, has even more of that beauty and grace than we had before. And I wouldn't change it all for anything in the world.

Thanks again for checking in with us. We'll keep the baby pictures coming.

Here are some new photos of Kate. Don't laugh at me for how many of them are essentially variations on the theme "Baby lounging on sheepskin." It might look like the same photo to you, but that's just because the various facial expressions of my baby aren't the most fascinating thing in your world.

Dan finally got to break out the stroller he's been learning to drive when we took Kate on her first walk around the neighborhood. Kate seemed less interested in this than us, but I suppose when you're in the stroller, there isn't much to see.

Dan in diaper-changing action. He's actually very good at this. I'm so proud of him.

The previously mentioned sheepskin series:

When she yawns, it makes me yawn. Of course, I think she yawns out of boredom. I yawn out of sleep deprivation.

These are the little feet that were kicking me so vigorously at the end of my pregnancy.

And hanging out on the couch with her Gam.

Hello, everyone. Apologies for the lack of photos yesterday. It was a busy day, because we took Kate to the pediatrician, where she was declared very healthy, and gave her her first bath, which was quite an adventure. It wasn't a real bath since her umbilical cord hasn't fallen off yet, but she really needed a sponge bath after a late-night feeding that ended with her somehow managing to get spit up in her own hair. I'm pretty sure having your kid smell like puke is not a sign of competent parenting. Perhaps it's fitting then that my Mom actually did the bathing, and I just took pictures.

Kate looks sort of apprehensive about the whole thing. I think she's figured out by now that any time we undress her down to her diaper and lay her out on her back in a room with bright lighting, something she's not going to like is coming.

And, as expected, she did not love the washcloth.

By the time we got to doing her back, she looked sort of resigned to the whole thing.

And once she was all clean and warm, she didn't seem too traumatized. But she did look at us sort of suspiciously for the next couple of hours, just like in this picture.

I'm actually considering giving her more baths since it makes her so alert. A lot of my life right now is spent trying to get her to wake up enough to eat. I took this picture at around 3 a.m. the other night after I had spent at least 15 minutes undressing her, jostling her around and basically doing everything short of hanging her upside down by her toes to get her to wake up, all to no avail. Here she is, snoozing away.

And yawning, just to emphasize how very not interested in eating she was. I think she's mocking me when she does that.

During the day, I try to keep her up for a little while after she eats in what is probably a futile attempt to help her learn the difference between night and day. This usually goes pretty well in the morning and gets harder and harder as the day goes on. In this picture, though, I had just changed her clothes, and she is doing her heartbreak and anguish face to show me how unhappy she is about that parental decision. She has the pouty lip thing down alarmingly well for an infant. I think we're in big trouble when she gets older and wants a pony.

And lastly, I might as well go ahead and confess to the Internet that we are bad parents and have succumbed to the lure of the pacifier. It turns out that this kid is a sucker, in the sense that while she isn't interested in productive eating all the time, she does very much enjoy having something in her mouth, and she'd be perfectly happy if I served as her human pacifier all the time. But since I have goals in life, like taking a shower, it's nice that she will settle for a paci. Also, we're entertained by the fact that it looks comically large next to her baby face right now. I told you. We're terrible parents.

Hi, everyone. Has anyone ever told you how you can't get anything done when you have a newborn in your life? Well, in case you didn't know, you can't get anything done, partly because you don't have time between feedings, diaperings, and trying to get some sleep, but also partly because you don't have any attention span, and so you walk into rooms with a purpose and then have to stand there for 45 seconds hoping to magically recall what that purpose was. So while I meant to post pictures all day yesterday, it just didn't happen. But now, here are a few photos for you.

First of all, the big news around here is that Baby Kate now has a belly button. I am glad about this, because frankly, the umbilical cord stump kind of freaked me out. Also, her little belly button is pretty cute.

This is Kate doing her "I have a full tummy and I am happy" face.

Kate tries out the blanket her Aunt Dinah made for her.

Kate being cute.

Saturday night Dan, Mom, Dad and I gave Kate her first real bath in preparation for her first trip to church on Sunday. We set the kitchen table up as a baby tub platform and had enough bath supplies and towels on hand to bathe and dry off a soaking wet golden retriever. This, of course, turned out to be overkill for one tiny baby, but it's good to be prepared. Giving Kate the first of what I'm sure will be many Saturday night baths made me think of a funny story from my childhood. When I was about three years old, I stayed the night with the Thompson family from our church in Yazoo City, Mississippi while mom and dad went on a brief trip. On Friday evening, Mrs. Becky Thompson, who in later years was my dearly beloved sixth grade teacher, tried to get me to take a bath. Much to the embarrassment of my parents when they heard about it, I declined this offer, and confidently told Mrs. Becky that I only took baths on Saturday nights, to get ready for church. Apparently, I sincerely believed this, not because it was true, but probably because Saturday night was the only time my parents made a big deal about the bath time ritual, and so I started associating Saturdays with baths. We're most likely setting Kate up for the same association, but that's not all bad since she actually seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few pictures.

On Monday, my dad left town after flying in for a couple of days to meet Kate, the child that he and mom have decided will refer to him as "Geez," thus setting the stage for all subsequent grandchildren to do the same. Geez is short for "Geezer," which has long been Dad's nickname amongst his own children. Specifically, my brothers started calling him this when they were in high school, to emphasize to him how anciently old he was quickly becoming, as if having twin teenage boys wasn't enough to make him feel the passage of time. That probably sounds disrespectful, but it's actually part of Dad's tradition of showing affection through nicknames. Everyone in the family has at least one, if not several, nicknames given to them by Dad, and frankly, they are all more ridiculous than Geezer. A few of those nicknames include Tuna, Big Girl, Middle Moose, Baby Moose, and his crowning achievement, at least in terms of length, Audgie Mo Paudge, Queen of the Audgie Paudgies. With that kind of record, I was expecting that Kate would have at least one nickname before the weekend was over. But apparently, Dad wasn't able to find one that felt right, because aside from some brief references to Kate as "Mumu" (pronounced "moo-moo") he never really settled on one. Nicknames aside, I think they got off to a great start as grandfather and granddaughter. Here's a picture.

Greetings to all of you in the world outside my house. Actually, I have come to think of you in capital letters: "The World Outside the House," because these days that seems like a destination far, far away that I have vague memories of visiting. For me, life is a series of three-hour cycles centered around feeding Kate, and that doesn't allow for a lot of venturing out of the house or even very far from the couch, where most of her meals take place. But it's OK, because I'm pretty sure nothing as cute as Kate is happening outside of the house. And I have heard rumors that eventually, babies start developing interest in activities other than eating.

In the meantime, some of the people from the outside world are coming and going from my home to help out while Kate is so little. On Monday, my mom, Kate's Gam, left to go home to Mississippi after three weeks of cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and generally just pampering us. We were so sorry to see her go. Kate and I both cried. But we're not left entirely to our own devices yet, as Dan's mom, Kate's Grammy, has arrived to spend the next couple of weeks with us. Here she is soaking up some of that first grandbaby love:

And for the grandparents and others who can't be here right now, here are a few pictures of Kate doing her morning stretches on the couch after a nice big meal. This first one looks like she's practicing some sort of Baby Power salute.

Kate shields her eyes from the flashing cameras of the paparazzi:

No words today, just a few pictures of Kate. We know that's what you want anyway. She's four weeks old this weekend.

We recently tried out Kate's swing for the first time. As usual with new experiences, she looked apprehensive at first, but seemed to like it once she got over the unfamiliarity. Here though, I think the expression says "Why were these people allowed to take me home from the hospital?"

The word of the last month has been "swaddle." Swaddling is pretty much the only trick we've got up our parenting sleeve, but so far it works like a charm to get her to go to sleep. It helps that we were given this nifty little wrap with velcro patches that make it easy to swaddle a baby. The fact that it looks like a little miniature straightjacket just adds humor.

Kate is growing so fast, and one of the things I want to remember is how beautiful and tiny and perfect her feet are. Don't you agree?

And lastly, this photo is a little blurry, but she's making such a hilarious face that I have to post it. This is Kate's glamorous face, or at least her very prissy face. I think photos like this disprove the theory that things like femininity and masculinity are learned. No one taught her to pucker up her lips like that, people.

This is the first installation of what I hope will be monthly letters to Kate about the things she is learning and doing as she grows. Some people have scrapbooks; I have a blog. What I don't have is any original ideas, since I am stealing this concept from a couple of my favorite bloggers. I hope that one day, Kate will enjoy reading these, but it's more likely that she'll be mortally embarrassed that I preserved my rhapsodies about her cute little baby butt on the Internet, to be available via Google for all time. That's the beauty of parenthood, though. This is my child to traumatize as I see fit. She, in turn, can start a support group for Children of Bloggers and vow to write her own children's stories only in invisible ink or something. This first letter is a bit late, since Kate was one month old on the 8th, but cut me some slack. I had a baby a month ago!

Dear Kate,

Congratulations on one month of life on the outside, baby girl. You have accomplished quite a lot in the last 30 days or so. Mostly, these accomplishments have come in the form of projectile pooping. Your daddy and I think that if it turns out that you are a space alien, we will know that your mission involves pooping on as many Earthlings as you can hit. In fact, your first act outside the womb was to poop all over the doctor and nurse who were examining you. For a while, we thought your grand plan was to poop exclusively on medical professionals, since a couple of days later, you nailed the nurse who was weighing you at the pediatrician's office. But since then, you've pooped on me, your daddy, and both of your grandmothers. So far the score, as far as we can tell, is Baby Kate 7, Everyone Else 0. So good work. You're making the mother ship proud.

When we were waiting for you to be born a little over a month ago, one of the things I was most anxious to find out was what you would look like, and what your unique little quirks would be. On the other side of your birth, it's so much fun to be learning those things. One thing we can say for certain is that you love to wave your hands. From the minute you were place in my arms, you've been waving your hands around in front of your face in these elaborate patterns that look like you're either doing an obscure form of Tai Chi or trying to cast a voodoo spell to make us do your bidding. I routinely have to pin your hands down by your side to get you to eat or you'd sit there, fanning your hands around, until you starved. This makes me smile because there are quite a few people in your family, including me, who wave their hands around a lot when they talk, and unless I am sadly mistaken, it's starting to look like sweeping arm gestures are going to be part of your conversational style, too.

But perhaps the most unusual thing about you so far is the way you sneeze. There is no way I can really describe it in words, but after you sneeze, you make this sound halfway between a dramatic sigh and the word "Wooooo!" The first time you did it was in the hospital, and your daddy and I wanted to find something that would make you sneeze again, just so we could hear it. We still laugh every time you sneeze, and on the few occasions when you sneeze without making the Wooo! sound afterward, we feel cheated, and worry that you're going to outgrow this particular thing and never do it again. It is the cutest thing I have ever seen a baby do, even if I am a bit biased in your favor.

Speaking of your daddy, one of the other great joys of the last month has been seeing him fall completely in love with you. Your daddy spent a lot of time before you were born telling people that he was convinced he would be bored to tears by the infant stage of your life, and was eager for you to reach six months or so, an age when he felt you would be more interactive and fun. People told he wouldn't feel that way once you arrived, but he wouldn't listen. This is now the man who walks through the door at the end of the day and demands that you be immediately handed to him so that he can hold you and talk to you and catch up from the hours he had to be away from you. This same man just yesterday saw that an outfit you were wearing was getting a little tight and said "Oh no! She's getting so big! I can't believe she'll never be this little again." And this same man who professed to be so bored by infants sings made up songs to you when he's changing your diapers or getting you dressed, both of which skills he has mastered with surprising agility in the last few weeks. I think it is safe to say that you have successfully wrapped your daddy around your drool-covered pinky finger. I fear for the day you can talk and ask him for things. There will be no stopping you.

As for me, I have become that woman I was always a bit skeptical of. The woman who oohs and aahs over her baby's every feature and claims to be endlessly fascinated by a little eight pound person who basically eats, poops and sleeps. The woman who will, if she doesn't catch herself first, tell other people all about how the other day? You smiled! You smiled and it was probably because you had gas, but it was so cute! I used to think these women needed to get a grip, or at the very least get themselves a tin foil hat to shield them from the mind control beams that were clearly taking over their brains. And now I am one of them, and I am sure people want to break into open snoring when they talk to me. But I can't stop myself. Anyone would want to tell people about the best thing that ever happened to them, and therein lies the reason your daddy and I have become such utter saps in a matter of days: You are the best thing that has ever happened to us.

So congratulations on your debut month on the earth. If you are a space alien, we ask that you be merciful to us, your hosts on this planet. We have lost our tin foil hats.

Love,
Mommy

Yesterday was mine and Kate's first day on our own as stay-at-home mom and stay-at-home baby. We did pretty well, all things considered. I did make a couple of rookie mistakes, though. Twice, I got myself stranded on the couch without a cordless phone, and so of course several people called while I was feeding Kate and unable to go pick up the phone. But that's why we have answering machines.

Then in the middle of the day, I decided we needed to go on a walk. I figured I could use the excersize and Kate might enjoy a change of scenery. However, I failed to check the weather and it wasn't until we were out there that I realized that not only was yesterday cold, it was also incredibly windy. I looked like a crazy person, pushing a stroller into the high desert wind, leaning forward with the effort, with my hair blowing all over the place. Kate was fine, because the top of her stroller can be closed up, but that meant the only change of scenery she got was the view from the little clear plastic window in the top of the cover. Still, she looked pretty cute all bundled up in there. Here's a picture I took of her before we went out.

As for the rest of the first day of our new gig, I managed to eat a couple of meals, take a shower, and even do some laundry. Kate took some naps. So it was a productive day. We'll be climbing the stay-at-home corporate ladder in no time.

Kate was six weeks old on Saturday. Here are a few photos of her recent busy schedule.

She has been smiling more and more lately, and I think they are real smiles as opposed to the smile-like facial contortions she does when she's getting ready to fill up a diaper for me to change. At any rate, the smiling is just the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Kate recently met her Grandpa Wachdorf, who flew in from San Antonio to see her. Here they are discussing the World Series. Dan and his dad have been talking to Kate an awful lot about baseball, and she seems remarkably attentive. Maybe she'll be a little Red Sox fan.

If she goes to sleep unswaddled, this is what she does with her hands. And eventually she'll start waving her hands around and wake herself up. Then she looks at us like it's our fault she is conscious.

This bouncer seat my grandmother, Mimi, gave Kate is the only reason I get a shower in the mornings. She'll sit contentedly in there for up to a half hour. It's magic.

And here, yet again, is my child with a pacifier taking up half her face. She loves that thing. I just hope I can get it away from her before she goes to kindergarten.

It's a defining moment in your life when you roll over in bed, feel a sharp stabbing pain in your back and, upon further investigation, discover that you have rolled over onto a bright green pacifier.

I think I have found the culprit.

Kate is styling today in her pumpkin hat sent to her by her Great Aunt Jeri and Great Grandmother Nana. I think the "shoes" on her feet are actually mittens, but she didn't like it when I put them on her hands. So they make good footwear instead.

Kate is completing her garden-themed costume with her sweet-pea outfit from Abby. Yes, our child's wardrobe has been exclusively provided by other people. We didn't plan it that way. The clothes just kept coming.

This is a face she has started making a lot lately when I get out the camera. I think maybe she is trying to tell me to stop taking her picture so much.

Trust me, she has her non-happy moments, too. For instance, the hour-and-a-half crying jag she went on this afternoon did not make me want to pull out the camera. But how can you resist such a cute smile?

Dear Kate,

On Thursday, you were two months old. You celebrated this milestone with a stroller tour of Old Town Albuquerque, accompanied by myself and your great-grandmother, Mimi, who came all the way from Mississippi to meet you. It was a nice day out, and we walked around to all the shops and had lunch downtown. As the day wore on, I kept expecting you to get tired and start crying. By the time we headed home, I was tired enough to feel cranky. But you were angelic, sleeping soundly in your car seat, the perfect Hallmark greeting card baby.

I tell you this story not to nominate you for Baby of the Year, but to illustrate the following point: As the second month of your life draws to a close and the third begins, I officially admit that I have no idea what you're going to do from moment to moment, much less day to day. Motherhood, I am finding out, is one giant guessing game. And you just love to keep things interesting. Because you see, a few days before your performance in "Kate Sleeps Through a Long and Tiring Excursion" you treated us to the world debut of "Kate Screams for an Hour-and-a-Half for No Apparent Reason on a Random Sunday Evening." It was epic, the way you screamed, evoking such tragedy and heartbreak. Bravo. Really. You were stunning. At least, your daddy and I were certainly stunned. I was also considerably freaked out, because the next morning, Dan was leaving for a business trip. It occurred to me that if you chose that exact week to start giving lots of those kinds of performances, I might never regain my mind enough to speak in coherent sentences again. So I braced for the worst, convinced that Dan would come home on Wednesday to find you still shrieking and me in some sort of catatonic state of shock.

Instead, you spent the whole 48 hours that your daddy was gone being so unbelievably cute that I was terribly sorry he wasn't there to see it. On top of that, you slept for seven whole hours one night, which meant that I got the longest stretch of sleep I've had since your birth. You haven't done it again since, but that, too, fits in with my new theory that mothering you is going to be a lot like playing charades. In the dark. Maybe when you start talking we'll be able to work out a more reliable system for communication, but in the meantime, I think I'm just going to have to roll with it and know that some days will be good, and some will just be hard, and there may not be any good reason for that.

This is not going to be easy for me, because if I love anything in this life, it is order. I love to know what to expect. I love to know why I should expect it. I am the kind of person who makes little lists of things to do every day and takes great joy in checking them off, one by one. Thus, it makes me feel totally incompetent that when it comes to you, my tidy little systems of discerning patterns and planning ahead are sometimes just completely useless. I think you know this one some level, and you are laughing a maniacal little baby laugh at night in your crib. Speaking of which, here's a picture of you the morning after your seven-hour sleep stretch. I came in to your room to find that you had managed to scoot yourself from the middle of your crib to the far side in spite of the fact that you were swaddled. You were also apparently quite proud of your little Houdini imitation, because you were laying there grinning.

This has certainly been the month when you've turned on the smiles, and when you smile that open-mouthed gummy smile of yours, it makes up for every minute of fussing you might do at any other point in the day. Your daddy and I frequently stop whatever we're doing so that we can look when you start smiling, and we'll do pretty much any ridiculous thing to get you to keep smiling once you start. And then I have to go get out the camera. It's a vicious cycle.

I think the smiling is part of the overall increase in your awareness of the world around you. Every day, it seems that you become captivated by some new object in the house and want to spend long stretches of time staring at it. For a couple of days, you were fascinated by the book shelves in the living room. I was all excited, thinking you were naturally drawn to the great works of literature on the shelves. But the next day, you stared with equal rapture at the dangling teddy bears on your swing, which was a setback for my plan to have you reading the classics by age three.

Since you like to look around a lot right now, Dan and I decided that it might be a good time to learn to use the Baby Bjorn, a hilarious looking harness that basically turns a baby into a fashion accessory to be worn on the body. Contrary to what your expression in this photo would indicate, you actually do like it, and you ride around the the house with me a few times a day while I do little tasks, and you turn your head from side to side, scouting for new things to stare at.

But by far the thing you love more than life itself this month is your lambi. Lambis are these little sheepskin mats for babies, and when the Rice kids were little, we all had one. My mom has pictures of all of us as babies on these things, and when you were born, she ordered you one. For a while, you didn't seem to take too much notice of what surface we laid you on, but in the last couple of weeks, you have developed a real preference for the lambi, and you'll lay there rubbing your face on it and grabbing big fistfulls of it in your hands. I'm thinking we're going to need a backup so that the world does not come to an end if this one ever needs to be washed.

Not that the laundry gets done in a timely fashion around here lately. I think you know by now who is to blame for that. But I probably need the bursts of chaos and unpredictability you've brought into my world. Left to my own devices, I'd very likely enter into some early state of elderliness, sitting on the porch with an afghan on my knees, reading a book and drinking tea, and start my golden years at the ripe old age of 35. I would make a great old lady, because that's the kind of thing I absolutely love to do. For now though, I'm finding that waking up every day and finding out what is going on with you is much more fun than anything I would come up with on my own, even if I never know what to expect. I hope you are having fun, too.

Love,
Mommy

Dan and I have been playing with the video feature on our camera this weekend, and have posted a short Baby Kate video to YouTube, mostly for our moms, who are missing out on some major grandbaby cuteness these days. But in just a week and a half, we start our holiday travels, so hang in there, grandmas.

That is me in the video, making ridiculous sounds that Kate thinks are funny. My alma mater is so proud right now.

Dear Kate,

Happy three months! Or as you would say "Aaaahahahahah lalalalala, ooooooh." Yes, this month, you have discovered your vocal cords, and now our days are conducted to the soundtrack of your babbling. For your whole short life before this, you really weren't much for making noise unless you were crying. If you were happy, you were quiet. Then, about a week ago, you started test driving your voice for other emotions, and now it's a big free-for-all. The talking is usually accompanied by a lot of smiling and a few sounds that I think will soon become your laugh. This is immensely rewarding, because now you actually respond to our various attempts to entertain you. I'm not sure if you actually think we're funny or you just enjoy watching us make fools of ourselves, but either way, we're all having a good time.

To tell you the truth, munchkin, I'm enjoying the end of this month more than I enjoyed the start of it. You see, this month in my development as a first-time parent, I have been learning about the concept of phases. I remember hearing parents say their kids were "going through a phase," but I never realized what it meant. Here's what it means. Occasionally a child will display some totally bizarre behavior that mystifies parents and defies all explanation. Then, just as the parents start to figure out how to deal with the mystery behavior, it abruptly stops, never to return. So "going through a phase" might as well be code for "trying to make me clinically insane by your first birthday."

The one thing I've got going for me in this area is the fact that I've been married to your dad for almost five years, and he, too, goes through phases. Specifically, your daddy has had a handful of hobbies during our marriage. First he had an Xbox, so I would buy him new games for birthday gifts and such. Then he got really into building and flying radio controlled airplanes and I had to learn how to go to the hobby store and talk to salesmen about airplanes. Then he decided that radio controlled cars were better because when they crash, they are usually fixable, unlike the airplanes. So the garage was covered in little tiny car parts, and I bought an engine for a birthday gift. For a while before you were born, he watched people play poker on television. I know. I can't think of anything more boring than watching other people play a card game either, but your dad loved it. I don't know what I would have had to get him for his birthday if that phase had continued ... a casino, maybe. But that phase ended too.

I don't know what phase you were going through this month, but it involved a week or so of more fussing than usual, followed by a week of even more fussing and refusing to nap, followed by five days where you fussed or all-out screamed for hours every evening. When you were at your worst, it seemed we couldn't do anything to console you. By the week of Thanksgiving, we were exhausted, and were so convinced that you were sick that we took you to the doctor. They checked you out, told us you were fine, and, I'm sure, wrote "Paranoid First-Time Parent Syndrome" down as a diagnosis. As reassuring as it was to know that nothing was physically wrong with you, it was also disheartening, because it meant that no one could tell us why you were so upset. We really felt like failures as parents.

And then, just as I resigned myself to a lifetime of shrieking, you stopped, and you've been your usual content self ever since. I am thankful that you're not planning to scream until we all go deaf, don't get me wrong. I just wish I could understand why you did it in the first place. Maybe then I could prevent it. Make it better. But we will probably never know what was bothering you, and what's worse, there will probably be more times in the future when you'll be upset and I won't be able to do anything about it. When that happens, I wish there was some way you could know how much I want to fix it. So much.

Speaking of my parenting failures, I read something the other day that made me feel that you might be falling behind your peers. I have this baby development book called "What to Expect the First Year." It's put out by the same people who wrote "What to Expect When You're Expecting," which I think of as "The Big Book of Things That Could, Maybe, Possibly Go Wrong in your Pregnancy." It's a useful book, but it annoyed me because the authors kept throwing in jabs about how I shouldn't be gaining too much weight. The basic message was "Remember not to get too fat, ladies, we wouldn't want you to keep that waddle once you've had the baby!" and things of that nature, even in chapters devoted to the months when any pregnant woman is guaranteed to feel like a water buffalo. Super helpful.

Early in my pregnancy, before I realized how much I would come to hate the title "What to Expect..." I picked up the guide to a baby's first year. At the start of each chapter, they list things that you might be learning to do that month. I was reading about month three when I came across this statement: "Baby should be able to pay attention to a raisin or other very small object." Really. A raisin. I had no idea that I was supposed to be dangling raisins in front of your face, but apparently, you should have been "paying attention to a raisin" since month two. So if you have trouble getting into Harvard in 18 years, you can blame it on me. And the raisins.

In spite of the lack of raisins, you are coming along quite nicely in your growth. At your two-month checkup, you weighed in at 10 pounds, 12 ounces, and are a whopping 23.5 inches long. This puts you in the 50th percentile for weight, and the 90th percentile for height. It also means that it's getting increasingly difficult to dress you. Your three month size outfits flap in the breeze around your slender little body, but the snaps that hold your clothes together lengthwise are constantly popping open. I don't know what I'm going to do, because they don't make infant clothes that come in "tall." Life is unfair. Ask your six-foot-six-inches tall dad.

You can hold your head up really well now, and you can also roll yourself from your stomach to your back. I say you can do these things because you often choose not to. I think you have my attitude toward physical exertion (Sweat? Why would I want to do that?) because oftentimes when I put you down on your stomach for some muscle-building tummy time as advised by the baby book, you decide that it would be a good time to have a lie-down. This is so cute that I usually let you, as opposed to ordering you to drop and give me 50 pushups, or whatever the What to Expect people would tell me to do.

This week, you and I are leaving to start our holiday travels. First we're headed to Mississippi, where your dad will join us closer to Christmas, and then we're all going to Texas. There are a lot of people in both places who are so excited about meeting you. I think they're right to be excited, because while you've only been on the earth for 90 days or so, I get to spend most of my time with you, and it's really a privilege to see what a unique, wonderful little soul you are. I can't take any credit for that, but still, I'm so proud of you. So I'm looking forward to month four. Remember to pay attention to your raisins.

I love you,
Mommy

Number of airplane rides we took during our three-week Christmas vacation: Five if you count every time we took off and landed on our way from Albuquerque to Mississippi to Texas and back. After all my anxiety, Kate handled the airplane like a champ. In fact, she slept through most of our travels. Apparently, to her, the plane sounds like an enormous sleep sound generator. Her fellow passengers loved her for that.

Number of aunts and uncles, other relatives and friends Kate met for the first time: 32 people and two dogs, unless I'm forgetting someone.

Number of Christmas gifts Dan and I bought for Kate: One.

Number of Christmas gifts everyone else bought for Kate: Eight gazillion. I am only exaggerating slightly, as you can see from this photo of Kate amid her bounty.

The gift Dan and I gave her is a Texas A & M teddy bear. OK, actually, Dan bought that for her, and while it's certainly true that Dan will use any excuse to buy Aggie baby swag for Kate, the teddy bear is actually an homage to the first gift Dan bought for me when we were dating, which was, you guessed it, an A & M teddy bear. I know. I can't believe that worked either. But I still have the bear, and I love it, and now Kate has one too.

Before you think we're terrible parents for only buying her one gift, and a fairly modest one at that, you should know that we had to completely redesign our packing arrangements for our return trip to include a suitcase the size of a refrigerator to accomodate all of Kate's original trappings plus her Christmas gifts from other people. This child now has a whole new wardrobe, multiple toys, videos, CDs, fuzzy house slippers, adorable stuffed animals and her very own inflatable yellow rubber ducky baby bathtub. Not a bath toy. A bath tub. You blow it up and put it in the big people tub, and the sides are nice and soft so that the baby can whack their head on the side all they want without sustaining any serious damage. Being a baby in 2007 is a pretty sweet gig, people. But back to the numbers.

Number of new rooms/ new beds we put Kate to sleep in during the course of our three week trip: Five rooms counting one hotel and one bed and breakfast, and four beds/other sleeping arrangements.

Number of sleepless nights all this change resulted in for me: Five. It turns out that the words "new" and "different" are not your friends when it comes to putting your baby to sleep. None of this was helped by the fact that about a week into our stay in Mississippi, Kate decided very suddenly one night that she was completely over being swaddled. Never wants to be swaddled again. Hates swaddling. Since she's pretty much slept swaddled since she was born, this represented a major change to be worked through, and working through it while on the road was, to say the least, unpleasant. But more on that in the four month newsletter.

Number of hours Kate spent being played with, walked around, held, and generally catered to in every way imaginable: Every single waking minute. Being the first grandchild on both sides of the family has its advantages. As oldest children, Dan and I both know that it also has its difficulties. For instance, it's pretty much guaranteed that as the years pass, Kate will get to do more than her fair share of babysitting younger cousins. But as the first baby on the scene, she has gotten an enormous amount of attention, so she can't complain. Basically, the drill during our trip was that Kate would go down for one of her naps, wake up, be fed, changed and generally attended to in all areas of hygiene by me. Then I would hand her directly into the arms of whatever aunt, uncle, or grandparent was standing there waiting. Then she would have at least one, and, at certain moments, up to five adults gathered around her doing all manner of ridiculous thing to entertain her until she started yawning or fussing or otherwise indicating her desire to take another nap. Rinse and repeat. Since we got home, she has spent a lot of time sitting in our living room, turning her head from side to side. I think she's wondering where her entourage went. Like maybe they are hiding.

Number of our belongings that will be returned to us via mail because I left them behind: Four. There's the baby monitor I left at a bed and breakfast in Fredericksburg, Texas, the cell phone I left at the security checkpoint in New Orleans, the blue jeans I left at Dan's parents house and the outfit of Kate's that had to be abandoned for immediate washing after Kate unloaded a massive diaper on it minutes before we were about to walk out the door on the way to the airport. Seriously, this thing was lethal. I can't imagine what would have happened if she had done that when we were in the air. I'm pretty sure an emergency landing would have been required. It was a biohazard.

Number of cars it took to get us and all our luggage home from the airport in Albuquerque: Two. Ours and our friends' Cody and Erika's SUV. You know people love you when they are willing to come out and save you from your overpacking.

How much fun we had: So much. It was such a joy to have our families get to know Kate and spend time with her. We felt so loved when we saw how unconditionally our families love her, and that just because she is ours, she is theirs too.

How good it is to be home: So good. I love our bed. I love Kate's bed, and that it is in a different room than our bed. I love our house. I missed our friends, and I'm glad to be back among them even as I once again wade through the process of missing all the family and friends we don't get to see because we live out here. This is the confusing part about living with parts of your heart in three places. But I think we're blessed to have three places that feel like home. Some people have none at all.

Number of loads of laundry I have to get through: Plenty. So that's all for now. But pictures and stories will come soon. Unless I left them in an airport somewhere.

In case you have trouble catching the theme here, these are just a few of the sports teams that Kate's various relatives apparently expect her to root for in her life based on what outfits she's been bought. They appear to be overlooking the fact that she's got at least a 50 percent shot at having zero interest in sports whatsoever based on the fact that she is my daughter. But for now, she can't express her interest or lack thereof, so we're humoring everyone. Yes, she loves all your teams. She hopes they all win every game. Ra ra.

We start with the obvious: Daddy's an Aggie, and so are all the Wachdorfs. Grammy Wachdorf was physically unable to walk past this A&M cheerleader outfit in the Wal-Mart in San Antonio. I watched it happen. It was like the outfit had some gravitational pull on her body. It was the day of A&M's bowl game during the holidays, and so we had packed one of the many Aggie outfits Kate already owns so that she could wear it, but Dan's mom was trying so hard to rationalize this purchase that I couldn't argue with her. This is the conversation we had, word for word:

Haley: Oh, you know, we brought that Aggie outfit for tonight.
Lorrae: Yes, but this one has tights and long sleeves!
Haley: We're just going to be inside the house for the game.
Lorrae: But it's going to be cold tonight! I saw it on the Weather Channel!
Haley: You just want to buy the cheerleader outfit, don't you?
Lorrae: Yep.
Haley: OK then.

That's Grammy holding Kate up to show off her outfit.

Next we have a part of one of the many San Antonio Spurs outfits that Kate has ready and waiting for the playoffs. This one came from my cousin Shelley and her husband Phillip, who are rabid Dallas Mavericks fans. We don't hold it against them most of the time. The outfits are great, but my favorite Spurs accessory so far is a bib a friend of ours made for Kate that says "My heart belongs to daddy and Robert Horry." Kate might have to thumb wrestle me to see which one of us gets to wear it though, because Mama loves her some Big Shot Rob.

Next, we have the Florida Gators, courtesy of Uncle Josh, Aunt Hannah Wachdorf's husband. Josh, we love you, but Florida is really a stretch. If you find a little gator-shaped hat, I'd probably let her wear it just for laughs.

This next outfit is too big for Kate right now, but as you can see, she is about to chew a hole in that toy she's so eager to wear the United States Air Force Academy Fighting Falcons onesie purchased for her at the academy by her Grandpa Wachdorf, a proud alum. He has also promised to tell her everything there is to know about fighter jets.

And saving the best for last, we have the Louisiana Tech shirt that my dad, Kate's Geez, bribed my sister Audrey to bring home with her from his alma mater in Ruston, Louisiana. Daddy was concerned that Dan might not allow Kate to be photographed in this, since A&M and Tech occasionally play one another, but Dan says that since A&M always wins, it's OK.

I know there are more outfits coming. We've got multiple Mississippi State University Bulldogs in the family. We've got Middle Tennessee State University in there too. Dan roots for the Vikings in the NFL, against all reason. And one of these days I should probably buy her a Belhaven Blazers T-shirt, even though that will mean I will have to try to explain just what in the heck a "Blazer" is anyway. But all that can wait. I think I've confused the poor baby enough for one day. Go teams!

Over the Christmas holidays we were thrilled to get to spend some time with Daniel, who is my sister's fiance and soon to be the coolest member of our family, since he knows more about Mac computers, music and photography than all the rest of us put together. We love hanging out with Daniel and we were sad when we thought we wouldn't get to see him during Christmas. But then a photo shoot he was supposed to do in Nashville fell through, and he came on down to Hattiesburg for a few days, and there was much rejoicing. While he was there, he was kind enough to take some photos of Kate for us. She rewarded him by inventing a grumpy face that she made just for him pretty much every time he got the camera out, which was very frustrating. But Daniel is a pro, and he managed to get some great pictures of her in spite of her total lack of cooperation. And now we get to share them with you! It's so interesting to look at these pictures that were taken just a few weeks ago really and realize how much she's changed just since then. That's why I am so happy to have such a beautiful record of how she looked at three months.

This is my favorite picture, not just of these pictures, but maybe ever in my life. I think one of the powerful things about really excellent photography is that it allows you to see the beauty of something, even something you look at every day, and feel how amazing it really is. As a writer, I am jealous that photographers can do that without words, and can, in fact, make words seem so completely inadequate to describe the glory of the things God has made. This picture does that for me about Kate. I look at her every day, and I always think she's beautiful. She's my baby. But, like everything in my life, I also take for granted how incredibly blessed I am to see this every single day. This picture makes me feel the way I do when I actually take time to think about the beauty that God has poured into our lives by giving us this child. It makes me thankful, and I should be thankful.

I love this little face.

And little feet.

Here I am trying to convince Kate to smile. She wasn't listening.

Later we went outside, and Kate's Aunt Hannah was able to coax some smiles out of Kate. Hannah can usually coax a smile out of me too, even when I am being grumpy.

Kate was totally not cooperating for these last two pictures of the three of us together on the pier, but I love them anyway because I think they make a nice conclusion to these photos, some of which were taken on the pier when we were waiting for Kate. We had a lot to laugh about then, and we have even more to laugh about now.

And, a close second favorite picture, this shot of our little family.

As always, you should stop by and check out more of Daniel's work here.

Dear Kate,

When I think back on this month, I am of the opinion that it is time for you and I to have our first little chat about the concept of things I do for your own good. I'm sure all parents, at some point, say "I'm doing this for your own good," and I'm also pretty sure that there hasn't been a child in the history of the world who really believed it. But now that I've landed on the other side of the parent/child wall, I'm here to tell you that it's true. Some of the things that you detest the most are the very things that I am doing in my attempts to be a responsible parent. It must be true, because I'm sure as heck not doing it for the fun.

The best example from this past month that I can think of would be the ongoing battle we fought against snot. Yes, snot. You caught your first cold this month. I'd been dreading it. I knew it was coming. Everyone we knew was sick, and everyone we didn't know was also sick. I fought hard. I sanitized things and washed my hands and shot dirty looks at the lady who coughed all over you in the grocery store. And in the end, you caught a cold from ... me. We were a sorry pair, but I think of the two of us, I had it better, for the simple reason that I can blow my own nose. You can't, and while that may seem like a small thing, it meant that you couldn't breathe. So I had to do something you hate and get out the nasal aspirator, or as it is affectionately known in mommyland, the booger ball. This device allows the snot to be sucked out of your nose ... assuming you let me get anywhere near your little pea-sized nostrils. You very quickly discovered your hatred for this process and you're smart, so you also figured out that if you thrashed your head from side to side, it would be really hard for me to catch you. And during the day, it was hard. At night, it was impossible.

Being a mom, I'm realizing, has some moments that make Fear Factor look like a tea party, and for my money, one of the best has got to be the middle-of-the-night sick child obstacle course. I'd come into your room at 2 a.m., swerving like a drunk person from sleep deprivation, congestion and general delirium, and determine that in addition to being wet, hungry, and pretty cranky, you basically had no unclogged airways left. So I would get you out of bed, turn on the hall light, and stealthily reach for the aspirator. Invariably, you would see me coming, and start flailing. I'd give it a couple of shots, trying to strike a good balance between getting the stupid thing far enough up your nose to do some good, but not far enough up there to damage your sinuses, and you'd scream. If things went badly, I'd miss your nose and have to start the whole process over again. If they went well, I'd then have the privilege of emptying the snot out of the aspirator onto a convenient surface such as my bathrobe, since I always managed not to have anything else handy. I'm telling you, if this were on a game show, I would definitely win big money and fabulous prizes. But I'm not in this for the glamor. I'm in this for your own good. So please cut me some slack.

Snot aside, this has been a really fun month for you. You have, as predicted, finally succeeded in getting your feet into your mouth, and you suck on your toes quite a lot. Now that you've accomplished that, your goal in life appears to be to kick your legs incessantly. All day long, whether I'm holding you or you're playing on your playmat or sitting in your swing or getting your diaper changed, you kick your legs. I think you're building up your muscles for crawling, which is something you're also quite interesting in doing as evidenced by the amount of time you spend on your stomach, waving your legs and arms around like a tiny, spastic Olympic swimmer and then seeming puzzled when your efforts don't propel you forward.

When you do crawl, I expect to just look up from folding the laundry or something and see you going at it. That's how I learned that you could sit up by yourself. I'm starting to suspect that you secretly practice your new tricks at night in your crib to make their public debuts more dramatic.For the last few weeks I've been propping you up and watching you immediately slump over, so I assumed you just weren't ready to sit up yet. Then last week we had a Super Bowl party at our house and as I was putting pizza in the oven, I glanced out into the living room to see you sitting up in front of our friend Susie like you'd been doing it for days. Show off.

This month, you love to squeal. You've discovered that your voice is capable of great volume, and as I write this, you're in the living room, playing with your toys and squealing with delight about ... something. I have no idea what. But you're happy. You have also continued to like for us to sing to you, and when I got tired of singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm, I started branching out. You're currently quite a fan of songs from the Sound of Music. I picked these because I knew the words to them, not thinking you would latch onto them in quite the way you have, and now I sing "Do, a Deer" about 15 times a day and feel like an idiot. I'm still glad that you like music, even if you do have terrible taste. And I'm thrilled to say that this month, you have really enjoyed being read to. We have started doing a little bed time routine with you at night, and part of that is that we read to you from your little Beginner's Bible that Mike sent you before you were born. We started noticing that you really loved that part of the night, so now we read to you some during the day. Here you are listening to Dan read "The Little Pea," which just came in the mail from my friend, Cara, who wrote on the inside page "To Kate: Welcome to the beautiful world of books." It made me excited to think about all the great books you'll get to read for the first time.
I hope you will love them.

By far the most fun thing about you this month has been getting you out of bed in the morning. Most mornings Dan and I wake up and hear you in your crib babbling to yourself. After a while, one or both of us will come in to get you up, and that is the moment we love the most, because every morning, when we walk into your room and look over the side of your crib, you break into the most ecstatic smile the world has ever known. You are so happy to see us that you kick your legs and squirm and giggle and squeal. We pick you up and you snuggle your face into our necks and we're off on another day together, our little family. And life is grand.

I love you.
Mommy

Time to buy your plane tickets, ladies.

The other night, Dan and I realized that we have truly had our brains rewired by the little person who owns all the pink clothes and pacifiers around here. We realized this because we spent our evening going to Target, buying a ridiculously priced baby jumper and putting it together. When we were done, we were so excited that we almost wanted to get Kate out of bed and show it to her. Because we're that warped.

This thing does not exactly go with the couch. It looks like a flying saucer. It has a piano that plays a little song and there are places to hang the baby's toys. In short, it is so tacky that a year ago, I would have never allowed it in my house. But here it sits, in our living room.

And Kate does like it. But the part she likes best is the little mirror attached to one of the activity centers. She sat and looked at herself for 20 minutes yesterday, vain little thing. This makes me think we probably could have entertained her just as easily with a two dollar mirror from Wal-Mart. Suckers.

I frequently do these days. Here's why.

Dear Kate,

On Saturday, you turned six months old. Half a year. I can't believe it. I remember thinking, when I had been pregnant for six months, that I could barely remember not being pregnant and that I felt like I would be pregnant for the whole rest of my future life. It felt like a long, long time. But six months of you being here has gone by so quickly that I almost feel like someone is playing a trick on me.

Of course that person could be you. I'm starting to think that you are pulling some kind of elaborate prank where you see how many ridiculous questions you can get me to ask our pediatrician. In my more paranoid moments, I imagine the following conversation occurring in our doctor's office when I've left a message about one of my many questions.

Triage nurse, hanging up the phone after listening to my message: Ha! Hey everyone! That Wachdorf lady called again!
Other nurses, stopping what they are doing: Oh, this is going to be good. What did she ask this time?

The best example of this from the last month was the Teething Fiasco. One night in February, you went to sleep like you always do around 7 p.m. and around 10 p.m. you started crying. You usually have a feeding around then, so I went in and picked you up and tried to feed you. But you refused to eat and started thrashing around and screaming in this very frantic way. Dan came in to see what in the world was going on, and for the next hour, we tried everything we could think of to calm you down, all to no avail. You were clearly in some kind of pain, and the only thing I could imagine that would make you scream like that was an ear infection. I gave you some Tylenol and you eventually calmed down and went back to sleep, but woke up again in the night crying. So first thing in the morning, I took you to the doctor. I had called as soon as the office opened and been told that a slot was available in 45 minutes, so I hadn't had time to shower. I was also sleep deprived and very worried, so it was not one of my finer-looking moments. You, on the other hand, were very chipper. You absolutely beamed at the doctor, especially after she gave you a strawberry-flavored tongue depressor to play with, and it made me look like a total liar as I sat there talking about how you had been shrieking in pain just hours before. An exam revealed that your ears and every other part of your body were in perfect condition, and the doctor told me that the likely reason you were screaming like that was ... teething. Teething! Totally normal and expected teething! This had never crossed my mind. I just went straight to infections and terrible ailments, and straight into the doctor's office. I was so exhausted and anxious that I had started crying when I was describing your symptoms, and our poor doctor, who is a lovely woman, had to spend most of our visit reassuring me. Meanwhile, you cooed and grinned and drooled and generally made me wonder if perhaps our doctor is too nice, and you just like to visit her so much that you try to trick me into taking you there once a week or so. At this rate, they're going to reserve a parking spot for us soon. I take some comfort in the hope that I will learn from this and not be so easy to frighten one day when you have a younger sibling. But I'm sure he or she will concoct new and even more terrifying ways to help me earn frequent flier status at the doctor's office. Fantastic.

At least it's fairly obvious that you are, in fact, teething, and I wasn't hallucinating the whole thing. You will chew on anything, and you are developing some pretty strong jaws. Here is a picture of what happened when your daddy failed to listen to me when I said "You might not want to let her do that. She can really bite hard."

I can't complain, though, because the majority of this month has been hilariously fun. This is mostly due to the fact that you have started eating solid foods. And words cannot do justice to how much you love it. You love it so much that at first, it was really hard to feed you because you would get frustrated by the completely ridiculous two-second wait between when the spoon left your mouth and when I could refill it and put it back in, and invariably every meal ended with you having a little fit of impatience. You also felt very strongly that you should be allowed to control the spoon at all times. Never mind that you don't know how to use it. At all. But as we've practiced more, you've come to accept that I can get the food in your mouth more accurately than you can, and you only take occasional swipes at the spoon. You do kick your legs and wave your arms in anticipation as soon as I put you in your booster seat, and that is very funny. So far, your favorite foods are squash and sweet peas. Oddly enough, you are not at all enthused about apple sauce or other sweet fruits. I will be putting this on your application for the World's Weirdest Baby awards.

This month, you have started to divide the people around you into two categories: "Mommy" and "Everybody Else Who is Not Mommy." You want nothing to do with people in that latter category, and that has resulted in some interesting situations. Our sweet friends, Cody and Erika, parents of your buddy Lily, called us up and offered to babysit you one Saturday night this month so that we could go on a belated Valentine's Day date. Knowing that you are a little clingy at the moment, Erika suggested that we could just go to a restaurant near their house, which we did. We were gone all of 45 minutes. And apparently, you were fine for about the first 30. And then you noticed that you had been left, and you started crying. Eventually you upset Lily, who started crying to support you. Cody and Erika were good sports about it. But you might want to tone it down if you want to get invited to Lily's sleepover parties in a few years.

Developmentally, you are right on track, if a bit strangely proportioned. You weigh 14 pounds, 10 ounces, and are 25 and a quarter inches long. You are in the 20th percentile for weight, 40th for height and 70th for head circumference. That's right. 70th. We love you, so we're chalking that up to superior intelligence and brain size, but for your sake, I hope those numbers even out a bit before you start school. You could get some rough nicknames otherwise. Sputnik comes to mind.

You have mastered the art of sitting up, which seems to have been the height of your ambition, because since you learned that you can hold yourself up and play with your toys, you are completely uninterested in crawling or other forms of mobility. I am told that I should enjoy being able to put you in one place and know that you'll still be there if I turn my back on your for a few minutes, because soon enough you'll be all over the place. And I'm sure it's true.

You do like to stand up and dance.

You are also getting very affectionate and snugly this month. One day last week, I was getting ready to put you down for a nap and sat down at the computer to send a quick email. Most of the time if I have you on my lap while I work on the computer, you try to assist me by pounding on the keys and grabbing the mouse. But that day you put your arms around my neck and put your head on my shoulder, and in a few minutes I realized that you had fallen asleep there. It was so sweet that I just sat there for a few minutes, because you really are growing up so fast, and I know that soon, you will have better things to do than fall asleep in my arms. And oh, how I will miss that.

I love you,
Mommy

We recently purchased a video camera, and we are ready to share with you our first productions, called "Baby Kate in her Jumper" and "Baby Kate Eats Sweet Peas." Our films promise to be rather mundane, but at least now that Kate is a little older, there are actual activities to film. If we'd had a video camera in those first days of her life, you'd have been subjected to movies called "Baby Kate Breathes In and Out" and "Baby Kate Blinks." It's probably best for everyone that we waited.

This first clip is of Kate enjoying the jumper/baby space ship we bought for her a few weeks ago. After some time trying to figure out how it works, she has become a big fan of this thing, and we have become big fans of watching her jump in it, because she looks like she's doing some kind of Riverdance-style Irish jig.

And this is footage of one of our early sessions with solid foods, where you can observe for yourself Kate's determination to be master of her own destiny and control the spoon. She's mostly quit doing it now, but she had gotten pretty sneaky about darting her hand in at the last second to grab the spoon. A few times, I just let her have it, but then she'd invariably try to stick it down her throat.

Here are a couple of photos to hold the grandmas over while I write Kate's seven month newsletter. Lately, everything goes in Kate's mouth, but that is especially true when it comes to the remote control. Dan started giving it to her to play with a few months ago when she was sitting on the couch one day. This was before the flood of drool that has come with her teething started. But now that she thinks it's her toy and is a fountain of drool, we often find ourselves wiping off the remote before we can use it. I'm sure the Direct TV people will be pleased when we request a new remote because ours are shorted out. On the upside, if she figures out how to work all the buttons, I'm going to put her in charge of programming the Tivo.

Dear Kate,

To start this month's letter, I have to break some unpleasant news to you: We here in the Wachdorf house cannot dance. It's true. Your dad and I are both kind of tall and gawky, and I learned a while ago, although unfortunately not before college, that if the Lord wanted tall, clumsy people to dance, he would have made us short and coordinated. This is bad news for you, because it means that probably once you're more than three feet tall, you aren't going to be as good a dancer as you currently are. You just don't have the genes for it. But have I mentioned how ridiculously cute you are dancing right now? Because that was my point.

A few weeks ago, during your bedtime routine, we started noticing that when we would sing the little songs we sing with you every night, you would sort of wag your upper body from side to side, like a person tied to a chair might do while trying to loosen the ropes. We thought maybe you were protesting your impending bedtime, or developing some kind of a tic. It never occurred to us that you might be developing rhythm, because neither of us has that, so where would you have picked it up? But over the next few nights, the wiggling got more pronounced and started to involve a lot of head movements and arm waving and we realized that you were getting down with your bad self.

And now for the other piece of bad news. It appears that you have terrible taste. Because while you will dance to just about any music we play, your favorite thing to dance to is ... the Chicken Dance song, as hummed by me. This one is my fault, because at some point when you could stand up on my lap, I started jiggling you back and forth and singing that ridiculous song and making you do the clapping part. And now, you think it is a riot. At least you'll be prepared for every wedding reception you will ever attend in the continental U.S.

On another musical note, it appears that I have a rival for your affections, and that is Rachel the Signing Time Lady. As I've written here before, you have these DVDs that teach you little songs and sign language. They are the only TV you are allowed to watch, and you don't want them that often, but apparently, you have started to recognize Rachel, who sings the songs. Rachel wears brightly-colored clothing and has really enthusiastic facial expressions. And you LOVE her. You are mildly interested in the footage of babies that is interspersed throughout each song, but as soon as the image cuts back to Rachel, you start squirming with glee. If you were at a rock concert, you'd be whipping out a little lighter to wave back and forth. And that's fine. But just remember: Rachel doesn't feed you or change your diaper, so you should still love me more than her.

This has been your month to discover the joy of fairly mundane objects. I already blogged about your love for the television remote, but you can also spend an hour in front of the mirror in our guest room, talking to that cute baby you see reflected.You don't understand how the mirror works, so every once in a while you start looking behind the mirror, where you obviously think the baby is hiding.

Here you are, ignoring your box of toys in favor of one of my measuring cups.

And this 99 cent rubber ducky has meant that I have to put a towel under my feet when I bathe you in the sink, because you get so excited playing with it that half the water ends up on the floor.

In spite of this, your daddy came home from work one day this month consumed with the idea of buying you a walker. Once it occurred to him, he just got in the car and went to Wal-Mart to get one. I followed him out into the garage, saying, "But wait, we're going to have dinner in 20 minutes!" He said he'd be back by then. And he was, with your new Disney Winnie the Pooh walker. I don't know what kind of spell you're casting on this man, but it's getting you lots of cool toys. You love the walker, even though you have only figured out how to drive it in reverse. Let's hope you are a little quicker on the uptake when it's time to learn to drive a car.

Perhaps the highlight of this month was the week when your Gam came to visit. Last month, I was blogging about how you are not particularly excited about people other than me holding you right now, but this month I'll have to eat those words and say that you are perfectly happy to let your grandmother hold you. I think it's because when a grandma is visiting, she's basically here to see you. So that means that during times when you would normally have to entertain yourself while I do something like, I don't know, shower, or eat, you can be held and entertained non-stop by someone who tells you how cute you are 12 times a minute. Who wouldn't love that? You got along famously with Gam. So well that on the morning she was leaving you were a screaming mess, and I had to change plans and have Dan come home from work to take Gam to the airport. I think the main reason for your fury had to do with teething, but the Gam Withdrawal in the next few days was pretty rough as well. I wish we lived closer so you could see each other more.

Overall, this has been a really great month with you. It's fun to see you develop your own unique preferences and quirks. You are funny and sweet and endearing, and every day I see you do some little thing or make some face that reminds me of your daddy or me or your grandparents or one of your aunts or uncles, and it amazes me to see how much we are all a part of you even while you are so clearly becoming a little individual.

But the dancing? I don't know where that came from.

I love you,
Mommy

The lighting in this video isn't that great, but you can clearly see Kate dancing. My favorite part is when she looks at Dan like "What are you laughing at?" and then goes back to head banging to this truly awful recording of "Old MacDonald" we found online. Why did no one ever tell me that having a kid would be this funny?

If you're seven months old, this is how you choose a book to read.

Look around for whatever books are on the floor.

If it is bright and colorful, lean over and pick it up. This will take a while if it's a board book and kind of heavy. Be persistent.

Now the hard part. You can't read. So the only way you can tell if this particular book is any good is to ... put it in your mouth.

Personally, I like to read the first few pages and decide if the book is worth reading. But this system works for Kate, who, by the way, is wearing her "I love Daddy shirt" so Dan will know she misses him while he's gone on a business trip this week. I miss him too, but strangely, they don't sell a lot of T-shirts with "I love Dan" on the front.

I think I've mentioned here a couple of times that we have yet to buy Kate any clothes. In case you think I am kidding about that, here is a picture of Kate surveying the brand new nine months wardrobe she has received in the mail this week from her Grammy Wachdorf in Texas. And that's just one grandma. There's another one. And think of the great grandmas. And the aunts. And the great-aunts. Economic slump or not, I think we can all rest assured that Carter's will be having an excellent year, thanks to our family. We're doing our part. In fact, my cousin Shelley and her husband Phillip added a new member to the family just a couple of days ago. So welcome to Mariah Rene, my second cousin. You're going to get so many cute clothes!

To start today's blog, let's have a group exercise. Raise your hand if I have ever gotten into your car and immediately commandeered your radio/CD player/i-Pod. Yes, that's what I thought, I see all the hands of my college roommates, my family, and, waving proudly in the front row, Dan, who hasn't gotten to choose his own driving music for six years. I admit that I have a problem. I hate to listen to music that I don't like. I even hate to listen to music that I love, but am not currently in the mood to hear. I wish stores did not play music while you shop, because I can't choose to tune it out if I don't like it. I hate the new trend of cell phones playing songs to you instead of ringing while you wait on the other end for someone to pick up. If I wanted to hear a badly distorted Nickelback song, I would listen to the radio. But I don't. Ever. And that's why those of you who have had to cope with my control freakiness in this area over the years will so much love this story.

This afternoon, Dan and I were running around trying to get out the door to go to a cookout at the home of a friend. We were running a little late as a result of the refusal on the part of She Who Must Not Be Sleeping to take a nap. Another fun side effect of the naplessness was that she was in a super-cranky mood. We've recently been driving the smaller of our two cars around most places because the air conditioning in the larger car conked out and we are hoping we can get by without paying the absurd sum of money it will cost to fix it. Because of the size of Kate's car seat, which must be in the back seat, this means that the front seat is so close to the dashboard that I have to sit up straight so my knees don't dent the glove compartment. So after a rough afternoon on the baby front, we packed ourselves into this car like so many circus clowns and started backing out of the garage to go to the cookout. Kate's response to this was to start wailing inconsolably.

Faced with a 20-minute trek across town, we were pretty much desperate to think of something that would keep her happy. And so we did something I had been hoping I would never have to do: We unwrapped the Baby Signing Time audio CD that we were given for Christmas and we put into the CD player. Immediately, the car was filled with the chiming, chirpy sounds of the Baby Signing Time theme song, as sung by Rachel the Signing Time Lady and her backup choir of toddlers. In case you've never heard it, it goes like this: "Baaaby, baaaaby, Baby Signing Time! Baaaaaby Baaaaby Baby Signing Time!" Kate instantly stopped crying. I, on the other hand, turned to Dan and said in all seriousness,

"This is a real low point in my life."

And Dan laughed and laughed and laughed.

Kate got to try out her new swimsuit her Gam bought for her on Monday when we went to our church's Memorial Day Picnic. Our gracious hosts set up a kiddie pool for the little babies. Kate really liked it ... for about five minutes, and then she wanted out. But in case I didn't have enough cute baby pot belly pictures, this makes a good one to add to the collection.

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

Every once in a while in my adventures as a new parent, something happens that makes me think "Is it possible that the baby is smarter than me?" This is the story of one of those moments.

Back before Kate was born, I read about a study some group did on the effect of television on the development of a child's brain. The overall conclusion was that television viewing should really be kept to a minimum (none at all before two years old, if you want to know what they actually said) and that typical television programming, with commercials and rapidly-changing images and sounds is too much in any case, so age-appropriate programs should be chosen.

This made sense to me, and so Dan and I have never really watched television around Kate. This means we watch a lot less T.V. than we did before she was born, which is also not a bad thing. She does, however, see us turn the television on and off when we put on her Baby Signing Time DVD that I've written about before. She likes the television remotes because they have buttons, but she hasn't seen them in action much.

This is why we were really shocked when, about a week ago, after she had succeeded in pulling one of the remotes off the end table by our couch, she promptly turned around and pointed it at the television. And every time after that, when she managed to snare a remote of any sort, she would wave it around at the T.V. Of course, nothing happened, but it was obvious that she understood that something might happen if she just kept at it long enough.

Then a couple of days ago, I was in the kitchen washing dishes, and Kate was tooling around in the living room in her walker. I heard her drag one of the remotes off the table, and didn't think anything of it until a few minutes later, over the sound of the running water in the sink, I heard this male voice in the living room. I came around the corner to see this:

Kate had turned the television on and was enjoying a program called "Take-Home Chef," which, as I learned, involves a beefy blonde male Australian chef going up to random people in the grocery store and offering to go home with them and cook dinner. And yes, I let her watch it for a few minutes, just because she was so proud of herself for finally making the television turn on. She clapped, and laughed and bounced up and down in glee. So I let her have her little victory.

But now the remotes live in a drawer in the coffee table instead of out in the open. I figure that will at least keep her from ordering pay-per-view movies for a few more days. Instead I think I will encourage her other recent hobby of stealing my cookbooks off the shelf in the kitchen. Who knows? Maybe she'll cook us dinner.

Dear Kate,

This morning I've been sorting through the pictures I've taken of you this month to pick a few out for your letter, and I have to say it was a little frustrating. This isn't because there weren't plenty of cute photos, but rather because almost every one I liked was blurry. A casual observer looking through the photos of you on our hard drive might think that some time around June of 2008, I developed a tic that prevented me from holding a camera steady, but that isn't it. So what happened? You started to move. And when I say that what I mean is that you never stop moving. The impact of this on my photos is that any given series starts with you a few feet away, then continues as you get closer and closer to the camera and ends with a blur of your face and hands as you finally reach me and put the lens cap to the camera in your mouth.

The effect on the non-photographed part of our life is that I am spending a lot of time pulling you out from under furniture, fishing pieces of lint and other undesirable objects out of your mouth, and generally using the word "No" a lot more than before. It's surprising how much you can get into, because you aren't really "crawling" in the classic fashion. You are doing what my mom describes as "unching," a strange, inch-worm-like maneuver involving scooting around on your stomach. It looks terribly uncomfortable, but you seem to like it. Every day, you spend some time on all fours and I think maybe this will be the day you "really" crawl, but then you just get back down on your stomach and scooch off to your next project.

As a result of this, I am developing a new kind of listening philosophy that I would describe as "no news is definitely not good news." Meaning that if you are babbling, laughing, or fussing while you go about your business out of my line of vision, things are probably OK. But the moment I realize I haven't heard you for, say, 20 seconds or so, I pretty much know you're into something. This audio surveillance technique is in effect at all times, just to warn you. This morning, I was in the middle of rinsing the shampoo out of my hair when it occurred to me that I was doing so in silence. Sure enough, when I looked around the shower curtain, you were nowhere near the nice little pile of toys I had left for you to amuse yourself with while I was bathing. Nope. You were doing a detailed inspection of the base of the toilet. With your face. Note to self: Step One of new showering strategy is "Set up playpen for baby."

This month has been really busy and filled with lots of family and friends, which is always a good thing. Your Aunt Audrey came to visit us in June, and you totally fell in love with her and her shiny shiny cell phone that she let you play with. Here you are with her.

We just came back from a trip to Mississippi, where you were endlessly entertained by your Gam. Really, the two of you are quite in love with one another. You got a little clingy to me on the first day of our trip, but we discovered that if Gam went and got you up from a nap without letting you see me, you were happy to hang out with her for hours at a time. This revelation meant that your dad and I got to go out a couple of times, including once to a movie. Outside the house. In an actual movie theater. With popcorn and everything. I have never been so excited to pay 15 bucks for snacks. We went to see Wall-E, because we are huge Pixar nerds. Since we didn't have a car, Aunt Hannah had to drive us into town and drop us off, and it felt like going on a "date" in junior high, when your mom drops you off at the front of the theater and you see a rated G movie and then go to Chick Fil-A on the way home. It was a great date, and when I rushed out of the theater at the end to call home, certain that you would be a hysterical wreck after three hours without me, I heard you squealing and laughing and having the time of your life with Gam. I admit, I felt a little sad at how much you were not needing me. But I think I can get used to it.

I'm starting to think we need to get you some little musical instruments to play with, because you were completely enthralled with the piano at my parents' house, and when your Aunt Hannah started playing her guitar and singing you silly little songs one afternoon when you were being grumpy, you were fascinated. You also spent the next fifteen minutes trying to get the strings into your mouth, but I'm sure all future musical prodigies do that when they are teething.

You've got two teeth now and you recently discovered that if you hold your Cheerios in just the right spot, you can crunch them up with those two teeth. There may be a less efficient way to eat Cheerios, but I can't think of what it is. Still, I'm not complaining. At that speed, you can eat Cheerios for a loooong time. We basically survived a flight from Albuquerque to Houston by going "Hey, look, here's a Cheerio! And oh! Another Cheerio!" Eight-hundred crunched-up Cheerios later, we landed. I hope they had a Dustbuster on board.

In spite of all the eating, you are still kind of little for your age. Several people on our trip guessed that you were six or seven months old, and at your nine month check up, you only weighed in at 16 pounds and 4 ounces, which puts you in something like the fifth percentile for weight. But your doctor says as long as you're growing, which you are, it's OK for you to be little. And I agree, because you're changing so much that I can see clearly that the day is coming when you won't be a baby anymore. Some days, I'll admit, that's a comforting thought -- today, for instance, you are teething, and are behaving as if the mere task of breathing oxygen in and out of your lungs is more than you can contemplate without screeching in annoyance every five seconds. It is a little much.

But last week, when we were coming back from Mississippi, we got on the last airplane of our trip, and you fell asleep in my arms during takeoff. Usually on a plane, I have a book and an i-Pod all ready to go to pass the time, and the thought of just sitting perfectly still without one of those things would sound like some kind of punishment. But you were so beautiful and sweet, sleeping with your face turned toward me and your cheeks all rosy, and right at that moment, I didn't want anything but to sit there with your dad and hold you and try to forget how quickly you are growing up. Slow down.

I love you,
Mommy

On Friday, I went into Kate's room to get her up from a nap and found her sitting up in the crib, eyeing the railing to see how hard it would be to pull up on it and throw herself out. Not very hard, really. And since the sitting up from a prone position was new, we figured it was time to lower the mattress in the crib to prevent any escape attempts. That kicked off a list of home projects that we got done that day (and by "we" I mean "Dan), and at every turn, Kate was there to inspect Dan's work. Here she is checking out her newly-lowered crib while Dan tightens the bolts one last time:

Dan then replaced some air vents for me and set about doing something involving setting up our old laptop to act as a server for ... something. I don't know. The computer jargon just flies through my mind. None of it sticks. Anyway, Kate helped with that project by doing pushups on the keyboard of the old laptop.

In the early afternoon, Dan headed out into the yard to mow and deal with some weeds that had gotten seriously out of control in our alley. To give you some reference for this picture that I took from the living room window, safe inside in the air conditioning, remember that Dan is six-feet-six-inches tall, and the weed he's spraying has exceeded that. Recently, the announcement sign at the entrance to our neighborhood has displayed the message "Will you win 'Best Kept Yard?'" No. No we will not.

Meanwhile, a look at what I did while Dan was out battling The Weeds that Deserve Their Own Zipcode. Kate's interest in new foods is growing all the time, and while that's a great thing, it also means that sometimes in a meal, she'll go through multiple courses. As her personal chef and waiter, it is my job to keep the food coming. I also make largely futile efforts to keep it out of her hair, but as you can see from this shot of the aftermath of one of her meals, I'm doing well to keep the food out of my hair. Do you think we have enough Cheerios?

Since Kate has a couple of teeth and more coming in every day, we bought her a little toothbrush, which she largely regards as a new toy. Here she is trying it out.

And after a long day, daddy and daughter now like to relax with a few games on the Nintendo Wii. I have to blog about the Wii in the near future, because that's a story in itself. But here's a picture. Kate's steering-wheel remote doesn't actually work, but she doesn't know that and probably thinks she's totally kicking butt at Mario Kart. I'm hoping to make the same kind of arrangement when it's time for her to learn to drive.

One of the most interesting things about having a baby is how often I get to see the exact moment when she learns something new, something I know she couldn't do just earlier in the day. Sunday night we were just hanging out on the couch watching Kate play on the floor for a while before it was time for her to go to bed and when she rolled her little plastic ball away from herself, instead of flopping down on her stomach and scooting to it like she has been doing for weeks and weeks, she crawled. Since then, things have been busy. Yesterday morning, while I sent an email, Kate discovered the joys of the pantry.

She was particularly taken with a box of Hefty sandwich bags, because it allowed her to play her new favorite game, Take Things Out of a Box. If it's in a box, she thinks it should come out. Unfortunately, she has not caught on to the rules of the game I then get to play called Put it All Back in the Box.

And then, when she had made the maximum possible mess, she was off to discover something else. She has to keep a brisk pace if she's going to unpack every cabinet and closet in the house.

Since Kate started crawling, she's been less and less interested in using her walker, which is really a good thing for me, because she was starting to get too good at maneuvering it to get to things she shouldn't have. One day a couple of weeks ago, we came home from a get-together with friends and I left a tote bag full of Kate's things on the kitchen floor. On the top of the pile of things in the bag was a sandwich bag full of Cheerios. I put Kate in her walker while I listened to some answering machine messages, and after about a minute, I heard this strange scattering noise in the kitchen. This turns out to be the sound of about 100 Cheerios hitting the hardwood floor.

She had used the walker to position herself to snatch the bag of Cheerios off the top of the pile, opened it up and shaken them all out of the bag. So she could get a better look at them or something. What kills me about this is that I know she is perfectly capable of just reaching into the bag and taking a few Cheerios out to eat. But why would she want to do that when she can make a spectacular mess by flinging them all over the floor? Not to mention the trail of Cheerio dust she left in her wake when she then rolled over them with her walker.

Yes, I think her driving privileges are officially revoked.

Dear Kate,

The first photo in this month's newsletter should really include a little cartoon bubble coming out of your mouth with the words "I am Baby Kate, hear me roar!" You are quite a chatterbox this month, and have discovered that your voice has the capability of getting attention. And you love attention. If we are sitting in a restaurant or other public place, and the people at the next table are engrossed in their own conversation, you seem to take it as a personal challenge to your cuteness, and begin waging a campaign of smiling, waving and shameless flirting to get them to pay attention to you. It generally works, and then we too get to enjoy conversation with total strangers while we eat. Thank you for that.

Your newfound vocal range caused me an embarrassing moment this week that is just too good not to blog. But first, some historical background: A long, long time ago in a land far, far away, before you were born, Kate, I was a newspaper reporter. A professional writer. Someone who could put coherent sentences together. I know that seems impossible now, but believe me, it's the truth. Recently, I decided to try to do some of that again, and accepted some freelance work for the publication that used to employ me. I knew it would be an adventure to try to line up interviews with you around, but I had no idea how direct the impact would be until I began trying to get an interview with someone we'll refer to here as a Very Senior Government Official. This particular official, as many of them do, has a press secretary, for whom I dutifully left a message one day last week expressing my desire to speak with VSGO. That part went fine, because you were taking a nap. Unfortunately, by the time he called me back, you were awake. So here is how my conversation with the Press Secretary for the Very Senior Government Official went:

Him: "Hi, Haley, I'm trying to see if we can work in some time for you in the next couple of weeks. The schedule is pretty full already. How much time would you need?"

Me (trying to sound like the professional I once was): "Probably at least a half hour, but ..."

You: "YAAAAAAAAA! YAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAH!"

Me: "Um, excuse me a moment."

He was very nice about it, but I'm sure somewhere in his notes he's written "Check press credentials on this one. Could be a stalker. Appears to be holding a small child captive."

Another helpful thing you did to assist me in my return to writing was to program our phones so that they wouldn't ring. One morning when I was expecting some calls, I let you play with the phone and an hour later, I heard the answering machine pick up and realized that you had turned off the ringer so my calls were going straight to voice mail. I felt really stupid after I tried for ten minutes to undo whatever you had done and ended up just unplugging the phone and starting over because I couldn't figure it out.For any one who is counting the score is now Baby Kate: 2. Journalism: 0

Now that you are a bona fide crawler, life has some interesting new dimensions. Specifically, it involves the phrase "What do you have in your mouth?" a whole lot more than it used to. I can't always watch your every move, but I can pretty much tell when you've put something in your mouth, because you get this squirelly look on your face as if to say "Nothing to see here, lady, move along." And then I've got about five seconds to fish the object out or spend the next 30 minutes watching to see if you suffer any ill effects from whatever it was you just ate. It's given me a whole new perspective on things. For instance, I'm kind of relieved when you put something like a coaster in your mouth, because at least that's big enough that I know what it is.

I am actually a little bit nervous that you might progress pretty quickly from crawling, which took you forever to do, to walking. In one week, you went from sitting up from a flat position for the first time, to crawling, to pulling yourself up on the side of your crib, the couch, dining room chairs, and whatever else is available. It appears to have occurred to you lately that if you can move faster than me, you can get to more stuff. I've moved everything that would really hurt you, but since certain things can't be moved, I've been working on teaching you to leave them alone. I know I've been at least somewhat successful because you already know what items you are not allowed to touch. I know this because as you crawl toward them, you look at me over your shoulder to see if I'm watching. So you're going to want to work on that poker face a little more if you're trying to convince me that you don't know what you're doing.

The first couple of days after you learned to pull up on things were a little rough in the sleep department, because you quickly discovered that if you didn't want to go to sleep, you could just stand up and scream instead. Then, when I came in the room, you would immediately stop screaming, grin and clap your hands because you knew you were doing a new trick, and you are always so proud of your new tricks. But when you let go to clap, you'd fall down and start screaming all over again. All I have to say is that I'm glad the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly. In case you haven't been reading the newsletters up until now, let me just reiterate for you that any sleeping you can do is greatly appreciated and will be noted in your annual performance review and salary renegotiation talks.

Speaking of the grin, here's a picture of a new face you make. I call it your cheesy grin, and you pretty much shut your eyes you smile so big. I think it started as way to show off your new teeth (You have three now, and two coming in on top), but now you do it almost every time I point the camera at you. Apparently, I've got you trained. In this picture you are enjoying the rubber duck tub your Aunt Audrey gave you for Christmas. If you squeeze the tip of this ridiculous thing's beak, it makes a quacking sound, and now that you have figured this out, I have to spend half your bath time making sure you have a continuous soundtrack of quacking to enjoy or you start trying to reach around the giant inflatable duck head and do it yourself.

You do so many new things now that it's hard to keep track. You are working on blowing kisses. You wave. You wave backwards, to yourself, but it's still waving, and it's really cute. You laugh when you find something new and interesting in your travels across the floors ... not a big laugh, just a private little chuckle to yourself. You dance when the theme music for NPR's "All Things Considered" comes on the radio, which it does every day at 5 p.m. when I feed you dinner. When you really like someone or are trying to be sweet, you offer them your pacifier. I have to assure you that I don't really need a pacifier right now about five times a day, and you always look at me like "Are you sure?" It's really sweet to see you trying to share.

You really are the highlight of our lives. Every night, after your daddy and I put you to bed, we sit on the couch for a few minutes and talk about funny things you've done, and how much you're learning, and how quickly you're growing. You'll be one year old in one month, which seems impossible, and if I had my way, you'd spend at least a few months being this age. But I know that isn't how it works. What a shame.

I love you,

Mommy

I thought these two pictures taken on the same day perfectly demonstrate the difference between what I want Kate to look like and what Dan would dress her in if he were in charge of her wardrobe.

First picture: Adorable Osh Kosh Sunday dress given to Kate by her Grammy Wachdorf. There's a matching sweater and everything.

Second picture: What Dan dressed her in after the dress came off. In case you can't read the whole logo, that's the word DEFCON plastered across her body, the name of this conference that Dan just attended in Las Vegas. I think Kate looks a little incredulous in this picture.

I have a feeling that this conflict will be played out repeatedly when she reaches her school years. I'll be trying to steer her toward great works of literature and music lessons and Dan will be right behind me trying to make books like "Java Swing" and "Linux Kernel" sound fascinating. (Those are actual book titles I got by turning around and looking at the bookshelf in our office that holds Dan's library.)

Probably she'll turn up her nose at both options and choose competitive downhill skiing or something else we'd never do as a life passion. I hear that happens a lot in parenting.

But come on, the dress is pretty cute.

This week, I've started letting Kate have whole things to eat. Admittedly, I've been a little paranoid with the cutting everything up into baby bite-sized pieces. But she's giving me pretty good hints that she's ready to bite off whatever she can chew. For instance, she pretty much stole this nectarine right out of my hands when I was holding her and trying to eat it the other day. So I let her have it. And had to give her a bath at 1:30 in the afternoon because she smeared it all over herself.

Similar results were obtained with a graham cracker. But look how happy she is.

Kate and I are leaving tomorrow morning for a trip I'm very excited about. Time to spend some time with these ladies. I could not be happier. Of course, right now I'm a little anxious. About the travel with the now-crawling baby who must not ever ever ever be sitting still and is very likely to try to leap out of my arms and onto the beverage cart. At least she'll have to make it past some poor sucker who will be seated next to us. I requested a window seat.

But before I go, I wanted to blog a story that I don't want to forget. Recently, I did something that I never thought I would do and bought a workout video. And while I'm not going to tell you what workout video it is, let me just go on the record here as saying that I have always kind of laughed at the idea of jumping up and down following instructions given to you by a woman on a video, but I am not laughing any more, because those women are not playing around. That is a serious workout. Or I am seriously out of shape. Probably both. But I digress.

Kate, as my sole companion on most mornings, is the only person who has gotten to witness me attempting to do this workout, and I plan to keep it that way. Usually she cruises around the living room, stopping to laugh at some awkward move I'm doing, or clap along with the bad disco/elevator music on the video, but for the most part ignoring me. Until this morning. This morning I was flat on my back attempting some brutal ab crunch invented by the totally psychotic woman who made this video. It was so hard to do that every time I finished one I was making this very unattractive sound, kind of a "Huh!" except that you have to imagine it in the voice of someone who is maybe about to die from overall wimpiness.

And I knew it all looked terrible, but I didn't know how bad it really was until I looked to my left and saw Kate. Lying on her back, lifting her legs up in the air. Going "HUH!" every time in this extremely guttural, painful way. It was a perfect imitation. Too perfect. She'll probably have washboard abs before me, she was doing such a good job.

Of course, since I stopped doing crunches and laughed at her, she spent the rest of the day doing her new serious workout grunt. She'd pick up a wooden block and go "HUH!" Roll her plastic ball and say "HUH!" She was apparently getting a very good workout all day long.

And I apparently need to get a workout video that I can actually do.

Happy weekend, people. See y'all when we get back.

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.

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!

As of 10:45 a.m., this is what Kate has done with her day besides getting up, eating breakfast and getting dressed:

Talked to daddy on the phone. He calls us every morning to check in since he leaves for work before we're up. Kate knows he does this and therefore assumes that if the phone rings sometime in the morning, it's Dan and she is entitled to talk to him. She demands this by going "Dadadadada!" until I give her the phone. This is cute unless, for example, someone else happens to call before 9 a.m.

Dan's phone call distracted Kate from her ongoing goal of eating this mirror from our bathroom. I think this is about teething, but possibly she just likes how it tastes.

Then it was time to try to grab the camera. End of photo session.

This next series of photos illustrates a series of things Kate did while I ate some cereal. First, she managed to get a lot of Cheerios on the floor, which is pretty impressive considering that she had to pull them out of one of those snack trap things that are supposed to prevent babies from spilling their Cheerios on the floor. She tossed the bowl and her pacifier aside and went to get her push toy. Then she rounded the corner and saw all those Cheerios lying defenseless on the ground. I just went ahead and got my broom out after I took the picture.

Once she had crushed a suitable number of Cheerios, she stopped to snack on the leftover ones.

And then immediately turned around to see what might be in the cabinet behind her. Nothing, as usual, because I moved all the cleaning supplies except for a spray bottle of water out of there a long time ago, but that doesn't stop her from checking every single day. Like maybe there will suddenly be some awesome loot in there.

And that is our day so far.Now it's time for lunch. Got to go.

On the upside, at least she wants to be clean. And I promise you I did not stage this photo. This is just what naturally happens if I turn my back on her while I put away the silverware.

Kate takes in a Baby Signing Time video while kicked back in her Daddylounger, the baby equivalent of a Barcalounger. She looks like she's a guy watching a football game. She just needs a little baby beer cozy. KIDDING! I AM KIDDING. Please do not report me.

And since Dan, the the most loyal member of the ten-person Haley's blog fan club, asked, yes I do intend to write Kate a newsletter soon for her 13th month. Apparently, Dan wants to read it, which is odd since he pretty much knows all the punch lines. But it's good to have readers, even if they are your husband.

Having a kid is nothing if not humbling. And one of the strangest ways in which we are learning your kids will humble you is by making you look like a liar in public. For several days now we've been going around telling people that Kate can walk. Then, when we try to get her to do it for friends, she just looks at us and crawls away, leaving us to say "No, really she does walk." It hasn't helped that we've also been unsuccessful at video taping her new mobility. But today we finally got a brief snippet on tape. She still seems to view walking as an unusual hobby she's picked up rather than a way to get around, so mostly she is still a crawler, but at least we have solid evidence that she can walk when she wants to. And not any other time. Production note: Bear with the shaky camera. The only way we could get this on tape was to have her walk towards me while I filmed, and I pretty much had to drop the camera in order to catch her once she got to me.

We were rewarded for all the trouble we went through to get that video, though, because right after we got the footage of her walking, she laid down on the ground and did the crunches I blogged about a while ago. In case you don't recall, I said then that I have been using this ridiculous workout video to get some exercise into my routine, and Kate has picked up some of the moves. Specifically, she has developed an all-too-accurate impression of what I look and sound like (at least to her) doing the cruel and unusual ab crunches my deranged digital personal fitness trainer put on the video. At the request of many people, I have been trying to catch her on camera doing this for weeks, with no success. But at last, here it is. Try not to laugh too hard next time you see me. Perhaps soon I can just turn off the video and let Kate direct my workouts.

Dear Kate,

Since I am combining your 13 and 14 month newsletters, you can probably tell that I have been procrastinating about writing lately. I think everyone goes through writing slumps like this, and for whatever reason I have been in one. But today, I have inspiration. Today, Kate, is election day in our great country. And that means that if I just keep myself busy for one more day, the election will be over, and I can return to a normal life that does not involve robot phone calls from Rudy Guliani urging me to vote for ... well, I don't know who he wanted me to vote for, because I hung up. So in case you were wondering why I yelled "I HAVE ALREADY VOTED! LEAVE ME ALONE!" yesterday afternoon at around 2:30, that is why. Sorry about the outburst.

The good news is that while the last two months have been pretty obnoxious regarding the election, you have been a lot of fun. The biggest change in you these months has been an explosion in your curiosity about what is around you. Shortly after your first birthday, you started pointing at whatever was in front of you and grunting. For several days I was interpreting that as you wanting to hold all of these objects, and since many of them were things that wouldn't be appropriate for you to have, I would say no and you would cry and it was a very frustrating cycle. Then one day your daddy saw you do that and said "You know, I think she just wants you to tell her what everything is." And he was right. Now we spend lots of time every day saying "And that is dishwashing detergent. And that is a towel. That is a trash can." And you are happy as a clam with your new knowledge and your first complete spoken phrase, which is "What's that?" I am taking this as a sign that you will grow up to be a reporter like Mommy. I will buy you a little notebook as soon as I think you won't eat the pages.

And then there is the walking. You still are not an exclusive walker, and spend most of your day crawling, but you can walk when you want to, and you are very proud of yourself when you do. Of course with every bit of new mobility for you comes a new childproofing challenge for me. This week, you discovered the toilets. And now, if I turn my back on you for an instant, you scurry to see if one of the bathroom doors happens to be open. I try to keep them closed, but two times in one day last week, I heard splashing and discovered you with your arms submerged to the elbows in toilet water, gleefully paddling away. Good thing you have recently picked up the sign language for "Wash hands." ( You also know how to sign "shoes", and this is a picture of your first pair of walking shoes).

Speaking of the signing, that's another area where you've made big strides these last couple of months. We recently graduated you to the second video in the Baby Signing Time series, and I don't know if you just like it better than the first one or if something clicked in your head, but you have been independently doing the signs without any prompting from us. The cutest one is that you have learned to sign "blanket" and you do it when you are sleepy and want your blanket. And, of course, your monkey. I think I've mentioned Dangles the Monkey here before, but you are now so attached to him that you cannot move from one room to another without determining where Dangles is. If I leave him in your bed after a nap I will very soon find you standing next to your crib and crying for him. So this week, your daddy and I took out a little insurance and ordered a backup Dangles from Amazon. Not a moment too soon, either. Turns out the makers of this particular monkey are discontinuing that model soon. So we've decided to order a third and then enact a "Guard the Monkey With Your Life" policy for the foreseeable future, because I can tell that my existence would become very unpleasant if you had to do without that monkey.

You're also developing an awareness of humor. By that I mean that you have figured out that when you do certain things, we laugh, and you like it when we laugh, so you do those things more and then try to think of new things to do that will make us laugh. And you mimic our actions a lot more than you used to do. The other day you came across a comb that had fallen off our bathroom counter onto the floor and without any hesitation you picked it up and started combing your hair. It's amazing to me how much you are learning just from watching. Like drinking from a straw, your new favorite activity in all the world.

Or how to hold the phone with your shoulder, just like mommy.

All these little things are adding up to a growing sense for me that you are really becoming less of a baby and more and more of an independent little person. And I'm so proud of all your accomplishments, but it also makes me a little sad to see that baby slip away more and more every day. Which is why I'm glad that every night when you and go to your room to read some books and let you wind down a little before bed time, although you now want to stand by my chair like a big girl instead of sitting in my lap, you still lay your head on my knee and let me rub your back and cuddle you when you start to get sleepy. I love that.

And I love you,

Mommy

Kate recently started signing the word "hat." She learned it on her baby signing video, but we thought it was odd that she honed in on it, since she doesn't often wear a hat. But at any rate, after a few days of her incessantly signing "hat," Dan decided to get her a hat, which I was OK with as long as it was a warm winter hat. She needs one anyway. He did a pretty good job, and came home with what has to be the warmest and most comical hat Target had to offer, complete with a pom pom on the top. Kate is in love with it and laughs every time she catches a reflection of herself wearing it.

If you notice, the front of my oven has drool streaks on it. This is because Kate likes to give her hat-wearing reflection big slobbery kisses. And because I have given up cleaning them off more than once a week.

I like how her ensemble here includes a soup ladle. It's good to have one of those handy.

Kate's buddy Heidi came over to our house on Saturday night so her parents could go out on a date. Kate was thrilled, because she thinks Heidi's every move is hilarious, and I think Heidi had a good time too. And I snagged this photo evidence that one day, unless their tech-inclined daddies intervene, these girls are going to be literature majors like their mamas.

So studious.

We've been a little busy the last week, since my mom has been in town. But here are a few pictures to give you an idea of what we've been doing.

Kate has discovered a new favorite accessory: sunglasses. First she wanted to wear my sunglasses, but they were way too big, and then she broke them. That's too bad for me, but not surprising since every pair of sunglasses I have ever owned has met some unfortunate end. I will never buy sunglasses that cost more than about ten dollars because they have the life span of the common housefly in my possession. Still, the greater crisis in this case was Kate's burning need to accessorize. So it's a good thing I remembered that a friend gave us a pair of little kid sunglasses for a gift. Since then, Kate has been even more impressed with her own reflection.

Of course, it's even better when you add the hat she already loves so much. And a Tupperware lid.

This is a funny picture I took of Kate's buddy Lily at our church's annual Pie and Praise get-together Sunday night. I'm not sure what Lily was doing, but she looks like a little frog getting ready to jump, and this picture makes me laugh. Church right now is pretty much a high-traffic zone for toddlers, which provides some quality entertainment and at least one spectacular collision per Sunday.

And here is Kate with my mom at the airport at the end of a great visit. In order to get this picture, we had to make Kate stop licking the public chairs we were sitting on. I can already see that I am going to need a jumbo roll of antibacterial wipes for our flights during the Christmas holidays. And maybe some Valium so it won't stress me out so much when she does go ahead and lick the floor of the bathroom in the Houston Hobby airport despite my best efforts.

Dear Kate,

You are sixteen months old today. As I am writing this letter, you are walking around in the living room saying "Ba-Ba! Ba-Ba!" over and over again in a sing-song way. The casual observer might think that this is just a random sound you are making, but I know that what you are really doing is saying "baby." You got a baby doll for Christmas from Gam, and you certainly love it, so maybe if I didn't know better, I would think you were just talking about your doll. But I do know better, so I know that what you are really doing is chanting your shorthand name for "Baby Signing Time," the videos we've used to teach you signing. This mantra of yours is not being trotted out for no reason. You want to watch a "Baba" video ... right now. The problem is that you've already watched one today, and generally I try to hold you to one a day. And so with my heightened perceptive abilities, I can now predict what is about to happen: The Baba chant is going to get louder and more persistent. Then you are going to come in here and stand next to my chair and continue your pleas. And finally, when I tell you no, we're not watching any more Signing Time today, you're going to throw yourself on the ground and flail around in an extremely tragic manner while screaming about how life is unfair and I am a terrible mommy. Not in those words, obviously, but that is what your general tone suggests.

I bring this up to highlight a development that I view as mostly positive -- namely, the fact that you have gotten much better in the last two months at communicating your needs and wants. One of the most stressful things to me about the little tiny baby stage was that all crying sounded the same to me, and until you got old enough to point or gesture or in some way help me narrow down the reasons you might be crying, I felt like I was constantly engaging in a big guessing game. Now we have no such problem. Your signing is really coming along. You're actually making me look kind of stupid at this point. One day recently I fed you some slivers of apple and you reached up and did this circular motion on your cheek. I realized you were probably doing a sign, but I admit that I had to go scan through one of the DVDs before I was sure.

You're also talking more. You can say mama, daddy, cracker, cheese, woof-woof (your word for dog), bird, car, banana, water and, my personal favorite, hi. You say it in this very perky way, like you haven't seen the person you're greeting in years and you are overcome with joy. "Hi!" You say it this way to total strangers, which got you a lot of attention in the airports last month when we traveled. When you decide the conversation is over, or you just get tired of saying "Hi," you say "Bye bye!" and sometimes blow kisses. It is all unbearably cute, and it really is helpful, too, because most of the time, I can ascertain fairly quickly what you are talking about, and then move on.

What I am not loving so much about your new-found ability to express yourself is the tantrum-throwing. I am sure veteran mamas will laugh at me, but somehow I thought this was a two-year-old behavior, so it sort of shocked me when one day while we were in San Antonio I told you no about something and you laid your 15-month-old self down on the floor and started flopping around while wailing and kicking your legs. You did it with such confidence that it was almost like you'd seen it before, like maybe when your dad and I have minor disagreements, one of us hits the ground and start screaming until we get our way, which I assure you does not happen. Most of the time. On the one hand, it is kind of funny in an absurd way, because I think this is your nuclear option, and you think that you are really punishing me when you do that. On the other hand, it is So. Not. Funny. Now that we're no longer traveling, we're starting to work on teaching you that it's not acceptable behavior. I'm sure any minute now I'll be able to report your transformation to perfect ladylike comportment. Or not.

Overall, the last two months seem to have been about you making the transition from being a baby to being a toddler. You even look different. Your hair is getting longer. Actually, it's just getting longer in the back, which is the nice way to say that you are getting a mullet. But a cute mullet! You insist on learning how to do new things, and get very upset if we think you are struggling with something and just do it for you. You don't want it to be quick. You want to learn how to do it no matter how long it takes you. It's pretty impressive, really, the persistence it takes to learn how to navigate the world. Good work. You even know how to ring doorbells, thanks to Aunt Audrey and Uncle Aaron.

You can run now, which makes for some great evening chases around the living room with your daddy. You're wearing out the second pair of shoes we got for you before Christmas, and when we came back from our holiday travels, suddenly there were all these new shelves and surfaces you could reach, which I guess means you've gotten taller. I think one reason I've been writing you letters that cover two months at a time lately is because one month seems to pass in seconds, you're changing so fast. Looking through pictures we've taken these last eight weeks, it's like I can see you becoming such a big kid right before my eyes. At least, you think you are. In your opinion, you should have, at minimum, a cell phone as cool as Aunt Dinah's.

But enough about you. Remember those tantrums I was mentioning at the start of this letter? Here's the truth about those: I'm not proud of how frustrated this all makes me some days. I am finding myself having to take a deep breath every once in a while to try to regain some patience before I set about dealing with whatever meltdown you are having at the moment. Yesterday, it even occurred to me that teaching you how to take a deep breath might do us both a world of good. So I showed you how to do it, and weirdly enough, you caught right on! I'm not sure you really understand the point of the whole exercise, since you generally go right back to screaming after you let out the big "aaaaah" at the end of your deep cleansing breath. Maybe if I enroll you in baby yoga you will chill out. It's probably also true, as your daddy keeps telling me, that some of this can be chalked up to the fact that we traveled for more than two weeks this month, during which time you broke through four molars (so gross!), caught a nasty cold (even grosser!), and didn't sleep all that well. So to be fair to you, my perception is probably a bit skewed as of this moment, and things are probably going to improve now that we are home and you are recovering from all of that. In the meantime, the whole thing is revealing my own inner tantrum-throwing toddler who just wants her way. Temporary or not, I think you and I have hit a stage in our relationship where we're going to have to exercise some patience and grace toward one another. Since I am the adult, and I love you, I'll go first. Since you are the baby, and you love me too, I'm sure I'll be rewarded with lots of big, slobbery kisses, which make up for a lot on the rough days. Keep those coming, OK?

I love you,

Mommy

While we were on our Christmas trip, Kate picked up a nasty cold virus of some sort. It never made her violently ill, but it has hung on for a ridiculously long time, in my opinion. At this point, she's mostly fine during the day, but at night she has these awful coughing spells that wake her up. I called her pediatrician a couple of days after we got home, because I started to worry that maybe she had a secondary infection, and we went through those diagnostic questions they ask you to determine if your child is really sick or if you are just being paranoid. (They are super nice about it, and they don't call it that, but I think we all know that's what they are doing, right?) They gave me some things to look for, said Kate will probably be fine in a couple of days, and that was the end of that.

Last night, Dan and I were sitting on the couch listening to Kate struggle through one of these coughing fits in her sleep, and Dan asked if I was sure we shouldn't take her in to the doctor. Well, maybe if it doesn't clear up soon, I said, but if you think about it, she's not running a fever, her energy level is fine during the day, she's getting plenty of fluids, and she's not suffering from any loss of appetite. And after that last one about loss of appetite, we both laughed, which leads me to the point of this post: I think Kate is going through some kind of ultra-ramped-up growth spurt, because she is suddenly a bottomless pit for food. She'll eat her food, demand more, eat off our plates, sign that she's all done, and then three minutes later be back signing "cracker" or "banana" or some other food-related message. This morning at breakfast, she snorked down a bagel, two containers of yogurt, and a piece of bread. Here she is checking to see if the yogurt is really gone.

And apparently, the little spoons just aren't getting the job done any more, so we're moving on to the serving ware.

I can already see the growth. She's definitely moved up a shoe size since our trip, and some of her clothes are starting to get a little tight. I think she'll be fine with me starting to put some of her bigger clothes into the rotation, since it will give her more material to work with when she's putting together her high-fashion outfits every day, such as this one, which looks like a cross between Rambo and Rainbow Brite to me. Funny, hungry kid.

Since we've been home from our trip, I've been having a really hard time finding socks for Kate. It seems like almost every time I am getting her dressed, I can only find one of any given pair of socks she owns, and some pairs just seem to have disappeared completely. For a while, I kept waiting for them to turn up in the laundry, but we've been home for a while now, and while I am not exactly the Donna Reed of the Southwest, I have managed to do all the laundry from the trip now that it's been three weeks since we came home. It's been a mystery, but not a glamorous mystery, just a vaguely irritating one.

In what I thought was a completely unrelated phenomenon, when I've gone to get Kate up from her afternoon nap lately, I've found her sockless in her crib. I hadn't really thought about how many times this had happened, because who has time to think about that kind of stuff what with all the laundry piling up? And then last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, it suddenly came to me where all those socks were. Predictably, I went to sleep and forgot all about it, but this afternoon when I went in to get Kate up from her nap and found her barefoot, I remembered my theory and looked between her crib and the wall. Sure enough, there were all the socks. By which I mean about a dozen socks, some in complete pairs, some loners, but still rendering the pair of socks to which they belonged unwearable in their absence. No wonder I can't find a pair of socks to put on the kid! She's been squirreling them all away!

What cracks me up about this is that in order to get all those socks down there, Kate has to have been waiting until I leave the room, thinking she's drifting off to sleep, and then taking off her socks and standing up in her crib to drop them down the chute. I don't know what ever gave her the idea to do that, but she's been very quiet about the whole thing, and very efficient too. So this afternoon I pat myself on the back. Maybe I am no Donna Reed, but I bet I could give Nancy Drew a run for her money. Thus is solved the Mystery of the Missing Socks. Here is the cute little culprit with some of her stash.

Kate's Nana and Papa Dubovik (her great-grandparents in Chicago) gave her a big pink hooded bath towel for Christmas. The hood part of it looks like the top of a flower, and Kate loves to wear it. Actually, it has solved a little problem for me. Kate loves to take her bath so much that she doesn't ever want to get out when the water starts getting cold. But now all I have to do is wave the magical bath towel and she's all for ending her bath so she can look at herself in the mirror with her cool bath hat on. Thanks to Nana and Papa, and to Grammy, who boxed it up and sent it to us from her house in San Antonio, since it was too big to fit in our suitcases!

As you can see, she doesn't see why she should have to stop wearing the towel once she's got her pajamas on for the night. This makes for a lot of tripping over the towel when she tries to turn around, but at least she is looking as fabulous as she wants to look.

As a mom, I have been amazed by how much laundry there is to do. It just never ends. But at least now, I have someone to help me. Now if I can just get her to tell me when she's about to unload the laundry, then I can get a basket underneath her so it doesn't land on the floor.

My mom gave Kate a baby doll for Christmas, and lately, she's showing more and more interest in holding it, wrapping it in a blanket, and feeding the baby its little plastic bottle. But the interest is usually short-lived as you will see from this series of photos that I took in a span of about 1.5 minutes.

Feeding the baby, happy for about 30 seconds:

Now noticing the bottle -- wonder what's in there?

Better taste it to make sure.

And now, having determined that there is no actual milk in that bottle, we're done with the feeding, so it's time to throw the baby doll on the ground. It's probably a good thing that the baby doll is made of plastic and that Kate doesn't have access to any real babies on whom she could inflict her mothering skills. Please don't report her to child protective services.

Dear Kate,

You are 17 months old now and while I have gotten into a pattern of lumping a couple of months into one newsletter, I felt that this month merited its own letter because I have a major breaking news development to report: You have discovered the outdoors, Kate.

I can't say when exactly you suddenly went from being content to look through the sliding glass door at the world to needing more than anything to go out and touch it all, but at this point, going outside is basically the goal of your entire existence, based on how much time you spend talking or signing about it. Every day, at 7:30 a.m., we have our first conversation about going outside. You go to the door, get your shoes, bring them back to me and then gesture toward the back door. If I don't respond immediately, because I am, say, trying to get enough coffee in my system that I can remember my own name, you are pretty cool about it. You give me an additional 25 seconds to collect myself, and in the meantime, you go and try to find your heavy jacket. But once you're done giving me that little grace period, you pretty much expect to be suited up in your coat, have your shoes put on, and then hit the back yard. This would be fine except, Kate, did I mention that you have decided to embrace the great outdoors in FEBRUARY? I'm not claiming that Albuquerque is the frozen tundra, but we have our fair share of blustery, cold days -- even snow days -- and none of it phases you.

I am not going to lie to you, Kate; this is challenging for me. I am not an outdoorsy kind of girl. I never have been. I have lots of athletic, hiking, biking, skiing, snowboarding friends, and I love them, but I am intimidated by their hobbies. I don't think we need to discuss how I feel about camping, mainly because I am afraid that if you hear that it is possible to sleep outside, you will start trying to drag your crib out there.

But whether I am freezing or not, we spend a lot of time outside together, and really it's a lot of fun. It also makes me thankful for something that happened a few years ago, something that seemed like a bad thing at the time. Three years ago this month, Dan and I were packing up the apartment we'd lived in our entire married life until then and getting ready to move into our first house. The way we pictured it, this would be the house where we hoped to be raising small children, and with that in mind, we talked at the start of our house hunt about what kind of house we wanted. A few bedrooms, good closets and play space, and most of all, a back yard. Back yards aren't a big thing out in this part of the country. It doesn't rain a lot, so grass is hard to keep healthy, and as a result, a lot of landscaping out here involves rocks. You will grow up thinking this is completely normal, but you have to trust me when I say that there are parts of the country where that sounds like crazy talk, places where trees grow like, well, trees, and grass is not an endangered species. The good news is that xeriscpaing, as it is called, doesn't look as bad as it sounds. But it doesn't exactly welcome you to take your shoes off and run around. Still, in the desert, a big grassy plot is a waste of water, and thus a lot of newer homes are built with really, really tiny yards. Patios is more how I would describe them as. You could maybe put a grill and a lawn chair out there.

When we were looking for a home, the real estate market was much different than it is now. Which is to say that houses were actually selling, and in Albuquerque, they were selling fast. Our realtor gave us this big pep talk about how when we saw a property we liked, we'd probably have to be prepared to make an offer on it that day. We got ready for bidding wars. And then we looked for a good six months before we saw a house we really liked. It was a two-story with a nice kitchen and open downstairs floor plan in the neighborhood that fit our price range. It even had a big playroom upstairs and was just down the street from a park. It was perfect. Except that for all this house had going for it, it had a really tiny yard landscaped entirely in rocks. It wasn't even xeriscaping. Basically, somebody backed a giant truck of gravel back there, dumped it out, and called it a day. We talked about it and decided that we'd just have to accept doing some landscaping as part of the cost of owning the house. With that settled, we made an offer, and it was accepted.

And as I said at the start of this story, three years ago this very weekend, we had most of our stuff packed up in boxes and the final closing was just a few days away. Then, on Valentine's Day, while your dad was on a business trip, I got a very apologetic call from our realtor who said that he was very sorry, but the couple who was supposed to sell us their home in a few days had changed their mind and were backing out of the deal entirely. Our realtor was stunned, since that almost never happens, and we were really sad about it. Not to mention we had to start digging through all the boxes we'd just packed every time we needed to find the corkscrew or the tea kettle. We were so discouraged we didn't even look at another house for a couple of months.

Then one weekend in April, our realtor called again. A new house had gone on the market that day, just a couple of blocks from the one we tried to buy before. He thought we'd really like it, and asked if we could come and look at it that afternoon. So we drove on over, parked our car in front of the address he'd given us and walked through the front door of the house you now know as home. We loved the open floor plan, the office and the big kitchen and dining area. So we went to check out the back yard. It has grass, not a lot, but enough. And trees. Two of them. There was even a swing set with slides and a little playhouse that the owners were willing to leave behind, since their kids had outgrown it. It was perfect. We moved in May. Every time we showed the house to someone, they would laugh about the playset in the back yard, asking where in the world it came from. It did look kind of silly, sitting there all lonely, with no one to play on it. I would look at it sometimes and think about the future while I drank my coffee and got ready to go to work in the mornings.

Today, you really figured out the joy of the slide. You would get me to put you up on the top, and then you would giggle and build up your courage for a few minutes, shift your weight and fly down to the bottom into my arms. You laughed and laughed and then you'd say "Up! Up!" and I'd put you back up there again.

It was perfect.

Well, Monday morning finds me blogging from the couch, where I am listening to Round 2 of Kate's Signing Time DVD and hoping that it will keep her entertained a bit longer so that I won't have to exert the energy to get up and find something else for her to do. We've been leveled by a disgusting stomach bug ... I got sick yesterday after church, and this morning Dan, who was supposed to be leaving for a business trip today, woke up with the same non-airplane-friendly symptoms. So he's canceled the trip and gone back to bed, and we're all laying low and praying that Kate doesn't get this. Since I'm doing slightly better than Dan at this point, but I am still glued to the couch, I figured I would post some photos so the grandparents don't disown me.

Lately Kate loves to sit at the dining room table and eat with us, which is fun, but she sometimes insists on sitting in the adult-sized chairs and using the adult-sized flatware. Because she's a big girl, you know, and booster chairs are for babies.

I'm not sure how efficient it is to try to eat raisins with a knife.

Like I said, I don't think she's getting much nutrition, but as you can see, she's quite proud of herself.

Kate was 18 months old on Sunday, but we were so busy having a good time with my mom that I haven't written a letter. Since we've only got a couple of days until our next houseguests arrive from Mississippi, I think I'll just make this a photo edition of Dear Kate. I figure this will make at least one person happy, since my sister Audrey recently informed me that she doesn't read anything I write anyway, and just considers my words to be spaces between the pictures of Kate. So this one is for you, Audrey. No frivolous words. Just the cuteness.

OK, a few notes on this first one: I don't make my child eat lemons. She does it herself. She cries when I take one away from her. Does anyone else's kid do this?

After going with a photo edition for Kate's 18 month newsletter, I found myself writing her a letter in my head anyway, so I am caving in to the voices in my mind and calling a do-over.

Dear Kate,

I hereby declare Month 18 of your life to be "The Month of No." It's not exactly that you learned to say no for the first time this month. You first said that word when we were staying with your grandparents in San Antonio over Christmas and you saw your Aunt Dinah run out into the yard yelling "No no no!" to stop her one-year-old Labrador from digging a hole. You did seem to recognize immediately that no is a pretty powerful word ... you spent the rest of the trip shaking your finger at poor Kemah the dog and admonishing her for crimes she had yet to commit. "Nonono!" you'd tell her, and she'd duck her head. When we came home, you used your new skill on dogs in our neighborhood. Apparently, you think "Shh! Nonono!" is what you are supposed to say to dogs, and I am not correcting you, since that is basically what I think most dogs need to be told most of the time. Perhaps I am overly sensitive about this issue due to a certain dog in close proximity to our home who still barks frantically at us any time we're in our own yard. THREE YEARS after we moved in. But I digress.

This month, you suddenly grasped that no is also a word you can use in your personal interactions. I recently bought a book about child development between the first and second year of life, and here is what this book has to say about your age:

"The 18-month old defends and strengthens his or her sense of self by opposing others. No is the favorite word."

Ha. Hahahahaha. Ha. They are not even kidding. I think in your mind, No might actually be your name at this point. Obviously, I knew the day would come when you would learn this word, but the most surprising thing to me about it is how many different ways you say it depending on the situation. There's the short and business-like no, which you use when I ask you if you want a banana. No, definitely not a banana. Next question. There is your funny no, which you use when we ask if you will give us a kiss or do some other thing that you actually like to do. You always laugh after you say no in that context, to show that you are teasing. Then there's whiny no, which you use when I'm making you do something you really hate, such as have your diaper changed, or wear clothing to go outside, both of which activities you are strenuously opposing these days. "Noooooo! Nooooo!"

My personal favorite is the no where you say another favorite word, "Um" and then kind of pause as if you're really considering the question, but gosh darn it, you just have to turn me down this time. "Uuuuuuummmmmm, no," you say regretfully, like you're trying to let a telemarketer down easy. I am fairly confident you learned to say "Umm" from me. I never knew I said that so much in conversation until you started saying it. My college speech teacher would not be impressed.

Although your ability to protest things you don't like is definitely up this month, you're also such an engaging little person that most of the time with you is really fun. You have figured out that trash goes in the trash can, and you have declared yourself the official keeper of the garbage in the kitchen. If I dare to dispose of something without letting you be the one to put it in the trash and close the lid, there is a pretty good chance that the first time I turn my back, you'll be fishing around in there so you can take the item out and throw it away properly. Apparently, I am doing it all wrong.

You play pretend now, especially pretend cooking. Your Gam got you a play cooking set for Christmas, and one of your favorite things to do right now is to stir imaginary dishes with your little spoons, pausing every once in a while to blow on them, because everything you cook is very hot. When you are really into it, you want to go in the pantry and drag out a few cans of soup or vegetables and pretend that you are using those foods for your recipe. The best part of the whole game is that when you are done cooking, you offer us a taste with your spoon, and sometimes bring us cups and pour us imaginary beverages to enjoy with our meal.

You love to talk on the phone, and it doesn't matter to you if there is anyone on the other end or not. We're taking advantage of this interest and having you call your grandparents a lot, and when you're in the right mood, you really tell them some stuff. No one is quite sure what you're telling them, because for the most part it still sounds like gibberish when you talk, but you are so animated that it doesn't matter. You are telling a story, and it is a really interesting story. You wave your hands and laugh, and even when you aren't actually talking to someone, you still pause as if you're listening to another person on the line, and say "Mmm-hmmm? Mmmm-hmmm?" Many of these conversations take place while you walk around the house holding your purse and wearing your dress-up pearls and sunglasses. If this is an impression of me, then you clearly have me confused with someone much, much more glamorous. Zsa Zsa Gabor, perhaps.

The best thing about you this month is how much you anticipate your daddy coming home. It is the absolute highlight of your day and his, for that matter. As soon as you wake up from your nap, you start talking about Daddy. "Daddy? Daddy?" you say over and over, and I tell you that he'll be home soon. We have this conversation approximately 25 times over the course of the next hour or so. As soon as you hear the garage door open, you start running so that you can come around the corner at just the right moment to squeal in delight when Dan opens the door. You actually do a little dance you are so happy to see him. We were talking about this one night and I told Dan that I felt kind of envious of him for getting such a rock star reception. I'm home with you all the time, so my presence does not inspire such hysteria in you. Then the next day I took you to the Mom's Morning Out program that some very gracious ladies in our church host. Usually, you cry when I leave you because you don't want me to go, then cry when I come and get you because you are having so much fun you don't want to go home. But this time when I came back to pick you up, you saw me and squealed and came running. You jumped up in my arms and let me hug and kiss you. It was awesome. I felt so special. You then immediately started demanding milk and crackers and cheese and all the other things you apparently think I carry around in my pockets at all times. But it was still a sweet moment. Thanks for that.

I love you,
Mommy

Below is a picture of what Kate did today, namely wearing her hair in pigtails (I'll give you three guesses how long that lasted) and stealing her daddy's fruit smoothie by just latching on to the straw and refusing to let go. That must have been quite a brain freeze.

What I did today was pack what has got to be thousands of mine and Kate's belongings into one serious mamma-jamma, very-likely-to-be-overweight suitcase so that we are ready to start our trip to Mississippi tomorrow morning. We'll be getting up at 4 a.m. to make our 7 a.m. flight time. Yes. That's right. I know. I should be going to bed now. I just wanted to check in here to ask for prayers for a smooth trip. The last time we flew? It did not go so well. And I'm on my own this time. So if you think about it, or happen to roll over and glance at the clock at some unholy hour tomorrow morning, say a prayer for us. We're thrilled to be headed home for Ryan's homecoming. I just hope the airline industry is thrilled to see us, too.

Today is our sixth anniversary. We had a nice night out on Friday thanks to babysitting by the ever-amazing Overbeek family, but today, Dan had to leave on a week-long business trip. Kate and I took him to the airport first thing, before church. I knew he'd be sorry he missed this little moment, but I had the camera handy . This afternoon, Kate was playing with her toys and I was vacuuming the living room. I turned around for a minute, and when I looked back at Kate, she was sitting in her toybox like she had been there her whole life.

I still have no idea how she got there, but she sat in the box and played happily for a while.

She also apparently had no exit strategy. She tried to get out, but eventually I had to help her, whereupon she immediately turned around and starting fussing to get back in the toybox. I think this probably sums up what we'll be doing in the next few days.

So these photos are for Dan. I love you and I'm glad we've been married for six years. Kate loves you and hopes you bring her a cool toy from your business trip.

Here are a few more pictures from the trip Kate and I took to Mississippi to see Ryan when he got home. I think they pretty clearly demonstrate why this week has been what I would call Attention Detox for Kate. When she's in Mississippi (or Texas, the world headquarters of her other grandparents) there is not a minute of her life that isn't observed and commented on by numerous enthralled aunts and uncles and grandparents. She is a rock star. So when we get home, and I have to do things other than cater to her every whim, things like laundry and cooking dinner and not carrying her around like the Queen of Sheba, she is severely disillusioned about life.

When we returned from this trip, it was particularly painful for Kate to come to grips with the fact that we don't have 40 acres and a four-wheeler in Albuquerque, like Geez has in Oloh. He took her on four wheeler rides pretty much every evening we were home. She loved it. She'll probably be demanding to be taken hunting soon.

The entourage does have some useful purposes when Kate and I travel without Dan, since they take over his job of keeping an eye on Kate while I get a shower in the mornings. These pictures were passed on to me by my lovely and longsuffering sister-in-law Kelly and taken by Aaron during a morning jaunt around the yard. I'm told that Kate was basically wandering around aimlessly in her pajamas and Crocs and every one else was just following her around taking pictures. Can you say UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS? Here she is with Ryan:

With Ryan and Aaron, her Marine security detail:

Leading Ryan on a trek to nowhere:

Kate developed this fascination with picking little pieces of grass and throwing them in the lake. She was weirdly insistent on doing it, so pretty much every trip to the yard had to include a walk down to the lake to relocate some plant life. Here she is showing Ryan and Audrey just how to do it. You can imagine her disappointment upon being told that we also don't have lakes in Albuquerque.

Dear Kate,

I usually talk in these letters about all the things you are doing in a month, and while I'll certainly be getting to that in a few minutes, I think the overwhelming theme of the last two months of your life hasn't been about what you will do but how you will do it. Namely, you will DO IT YOURSELF. Right this red hot minute. And heaven help anyone who helps you or gets in your way.

I knew this was coming, because I wised up a couple of months ago and bought a book about this year of your life. I read all about the "I can do it by myself" phase. But I was unprepared for the way this phase is manifesting itself in your unique little personality. Kate, I love you, but I think it would be good for you (and probably your future husband) if we're up front about something: You can be kind of high-maintenance. Sorry. I can be that way too, so you come by it honest. In our defense, I don't think we're generally demanding people, but when it comes to certain things, we just "want it the way we want it" as Meg Ryan says in When Harry Met Sally.

Harry Burns: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally Albright: Which one am I?
Harry Burns: You're the worst kind; you're high maintenance but you think you're low maintenance.
Sally Albright: I don't see that.
Harry Burns: You don't see that? Waiter, I'll begin with a house salad, but I don't want the regular dressing. I'll have the balsamic vinegar and oil, but on the side. And then the salmon with the mustard sauce, but I want the mustard sauce on the side. "On the side" is a very big thing for you.
Sally Albright: Well, I just want it the way I want it.
Harry Burns: I know; high maintenance.

I could tell thousands of stories about how this has played out for your poor father who has to deal with me all the time, but this letter is about you, so we'll keep the focus there. For you, as a high maintenance kind of girl, it's all about the little things. Right now, you insist on having a plate for all your food. I think it's because we eat off plates, and you're very into doing what we do, but if I try to put your food directly on a high chair tray like you were some kind of baby, you refuse to touch it. You also want nothing to do with plastic beginner forks. You want a real silver fork, preferably sharp enough to poke your eye out. Sometimes you want to sit in one of the chairs at the table instead of in your high chair, and I am supposed to read your mind and know which way you want it before I start trying to seat you. You do NOT want to have your face wiped, your diaper changed, or your clothes put on you unless it was your idea first. The list of things you want to do in a certain way at a certain time goes on and on.

This means that as a mom, I am working on what I believe is called picking my battles. I am proud to say that you now allow your teeth to be brushed without being restrained or making me afraid that I will lose a finger. This sounds like a small thing, but I'm telling you, Kate, that was a two month battle. Two. Months. And it was worth it, because your teeth are important and I don't want them to fall out of your head. But I do not have months of my life to spend waiting you out on things that don't really matter, so the rest of the time I am learning a giant lesson in Letting It Go. This is a big stretch for me, to say the least. (Have I mentioned that when I was a little kid, my nickname was Big Time Bossy Britches? Yeah, I think I am getting some payback now. Your Gam is highly amused.)

Living with you is interesting in ways I could never have imagined even a year ago. You definitely get more challenging as you grow, but you are so much fun right now that I wouldn't go back to one of your previous stages for anything, even though I loved those at the time. It's really cool to see how your increasing grasp of spoken language combined with the signing you've learned really makes you able to talk to us in remarkable detail. You know your name, which you pronounce "Ate." You know where your ears and nose and mouth and eyes and feet are. You can pick Elmo out of a lineup from 20 yards. You pronounce it "Elbow" which is pretty cute.

You are developing quite an imagination. This mostly extends to Dangles the Monkey. Dangles is already a big part of our world, but lately, he has a busy life of his own to lead. He has to have a bagel in the morning, just like you. You have to put him in the high chair, snap the tray on, and give him a sippy cup of milk too. You hold it up to his mouth and make smacking sounds so that I know he is enjoying his breakfast. You insist that I kiss him goodnight when I kiss you before your nap and bedtime. And we recently started having to explain to you about how Dangles takes special baths that aren't in the tub, because one night, I caught you about one-half second before you threw him over the side of the tub so he could enjoy your evening bath with you.

You love to imitate anything that we do. You kind of insist on it, actually, to the point that I recently had to make you your own bag of makeup so that you would let me use mine in the morning when I'm getting ready. I filled a bag with a bunch of samples that you can't get open and gave you some brushes, and now we both do our makeup in the morning. This may backfire on me when you do figure out how to open those little jars, but for now it's a good solution.

I love it that you pretend like this, and it's really impressed upon me the extent to which you really do learn by watching your dad and I. I never realized that more clearly in these last two month than one Sunday when we were at church. Our church doesn't have a nursery during the worship service because we think it's important for children, even at your age, to be part of worshiping God with the church. It's not a really common practice, and it's one that's honestly hard to stick with at times. We've got a lot of toddlers your age in our church, and there are Sundays when it seems like you've all communicated via telepathy on Saturday night about the exact moment in the service when you will all completely lose it and start a riot.

We had been through a few weeks where you were leading that riot, and I was getting pretty discouraged. Then one Sunday, when we stood up to sing, you wanted to stand up with us, and you sang in your little way, which is sort of a wordless humming. When we bowed our heads to pray, you held our hands and closed your eyes and said "Amen!" at the end. (Awww-meeen is what it sounds like when you say it.) All this happened in a five minute span, and then you were right back to squirming and demanding graham crackers and trying to take your Sunday shoes off and the usual things. But I was so thankful for the chance to see that you are learning this, too. There really are no magical turning points in parenting, I'm realizing. There's just a lot of plugging along, trying to be faithful. I really won't know for a long time what that work will yield. But my prayer for you is that even now you will love the Lord and walk in his ways. That is the most important thing.

I love you,
Mommy

Dear Kate,

About six months ago, I bought this little insulated lunch sack, the kind designed to keep food cool. At the time, I bought it so I would have something to send snacks in when you went to our church's Mom's Morning Out program one day every other week. I'd fill it up with food on that one day, and then it would sit on a shelf in the pantry, empty for the next two weeks.

I bring this up because I realized the other day that in the last month, I have packed a lunch in that sack almost every week day, and that this marks a major transition for us. Suddenly, this month, you have realized that there are things in the world outside of our house, and you want to go and see them. So we go. We go to the zoo and the botanical gardens and the library and the park and sometimes to Target just so you can walk up and down the aisles and greet your public. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" you say to everyone who passes, and you wave like you're on a parade float.

This new phase of activity has been made possible by the disappearance of your morning nap, and I have to say that I'm happy to be on this side of that transition. For what seemed like forever, we were in this weird place where you didn't want to take a nap in the morning, but you still needed one. So some days you'd fall asleep in the morning and then refuse to take your afternoon nap, making you an absolute sleep-deprived mess by 5 p.m. Other days, you'd skip the morning nap and be in a state of delirium by the time your afternoon nap rolled around. Since anything that involves disruption of your sleep patterns is basically the shortest route between your regular fun personality and the crankiest version of you, I really didn't have time to think about what it would be like once you got down to the one nap. I was just trying to survive the getting there. And then suddenly, one day, I realized that you are a one-nap girl, so once you get up for the day around 7 a.m., you're ready to go. All morning. Until 1 p.m.

I have to tell you that when I first processed the fact that there were now seven straight hours of consciousness in your day, I kind of panicked. I mean, what was I going to do with you for that long? For a couple of weeks, I tried to just proceed as normal, keeping you occupied with toys and crayons and Elmo videos while I got dressed for the day and tried to get things done around the house. That did not work at all. You were bored, and it basically turned you into the Seven Hour Roving Force of Destruction. By the time I'd successfully showered, the living room looked like post-hurricane news footage. I'd follow you around all morning trying to clean up messes you had made mostly out of boredom.

I realized after a couple of weeks that I was going to have to get a new strategy and that it was probably going to have to involve getting you out of the house more. But I really didn't want to. I'm kind of a homebody, Kate. Your dad likes to use the word "antisocial," but I think that's overly harsh. What is true is that I could easily stay in my house for a week at a time and not be too bothered. So embracing my new role as Tour Director of Albuquerque has been exhausting. I think it's yet another way that parenting is challenging me to grow as a person in ways I wouldn't necessarily choose for myself. I'll know I've really arrived if I ever find myself on the sidelines of a Little League game. But we're not there yet, so these days, I'm just trying to get really good at packing sack lunches, sunscreen, and everything else we'll need to survive a morning out, sometimes exploring Albuquerque on our own, sometimes seeing friends. Speaking of which, here you are having tea with your friend Heidi.

And having a conversation with Clarence, hopefully a chat about your wedding plans, since his mom and I have agreed that you two will marry one another when you're older. We might let you have a vote about it too, but it is depends on if you are nice to us.

It hasn't taken you long to embrace your new social calendar. In fact, if 10 a.m. rolls around and we haven't left the house, you stand by the door to the garage and chant "Car! Car! Car!" Then you go get your shoes. Then you go get me my shoes. You are nothing if not persistent. This leads me to another area in which you are developing some new skills, for better or for worse. Right now, you remember everything. Seriously, everything. This is good because you are picking up new words every day. You also know how to count to two (hey, you have to start somewhere) and that B comes after A. But your real area of expertise is remembering every time you were ever fed some kind of food that you liked, and where we put it away when we were done. A few weeks ago, we bought some ice cream and you saw us put it away in the freezer. Big mistake. For the next week, every time you walked past the freezer, you would launch into this elaborate routine of signing "ice cream," jumping up and down and generally conveying the idea that you would like some ice cream, right now, pleasepleasepleaseplease. This happened about a dozen times a day until we made a big show of finishing the last of the ice cream and then making you watch us throw the empty container away.

Now on that evidence alone, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me about your taste-photographic memory. I mean, I pretty much remember everywhere anyone ever gave me ice cream, too, and I try to go back to those places as often as possible in the hope that someone will give me some more. What happened when I started giving you half a Flintstone vitamin is another matter entirely. At your last checkup, your pediatrician and I were discussing you and your general attitude toward food, which can be summed up as "Eh. I could live without it." Except that Kate! You can't live without food! So if I had my way, you would eat a lot more food, but you have other plans, plans that involve eating like an Olympic swimmer for a day or so and then spending two weeks sustaining yourself by nibbling at the corners of crackers and eating half-mouthfuls of banana here and there. Our doctor assures me that you are healthy, but she said that if I wanted, I could give you a vitamin to make sure you're getting all your nutrients. So a couple of weeks later, I picked up some chewable vitamins and started giving them to you at night.

It's so funny to me how the smallest things, done with the best of intentions, can backfire on you in parenting. At first, you weren't really sure how you felt about the vitamins. You would put them in your mouth, take them back out, look at them for a while, and sometimes set one down on the coffee table and walk away, like "Well I'm done with that now." Since that's pretty much your reaction to everything you put in your mouth that isn't ice cream, I just kept giving you the vitamins, and sure enough, you eventually started eating them without complaint. Then you started asking for them at bed time. You call them "yummies" which you pronounce "ummies," and I thought that was so cute. Then you started asking for ummies in the morning, and at lunch, and in the afternoon, and every 20 minutes. Today I think we had the Vitamin Conversation at least 45 times and Kate, if I hear the work ummy one more time, I am going to lock myself in the laundry room and turn the dryer on to muffle the sound of my insane laughter as my mind finally leaves me. I may be the first parent in world history who has to ban Flintstone vitamins from my home like they were sugar-coated and soaked in trans fat. Your doctor is going to ask how the vitamins have been going, and I'm going to have to tell her that we couldn't handle it and had to quit and enter Vitamin Rehab.

Since you're a little Flinstone addict, it's good to be able to report that this month you are much more spontaneously affectionate than you have ever been before. You have always liked to snuggle, but lately, you will come running up to your daddy or me and give us a hug, or a kiss on the cheek when we're reading together at night. When I'm putting you down for a nap, you lay your head on my shoulder and pat me on the back, like I do to you when I'm comforting you after a bump on the head or the tragic news that you can't have ice cream at 9:30 a.m. I think of those bursts of affection from you as rewards for me, and also as an opportunity to remember that life is probably a little challenging for you too right now. I know that I have to tell you no a lot these days. I'm told by other parents that I'll be doing that in different ways at different times in your life for a long time to come. So I think it's important to say that I only tell you no because I love you and want what is best for you. And sometimes because I just can't handle another Elmo video.

I love you,
Mommy

P.S. The theme of this month's pictures is "Look! Kate's hair is long enough to stay in pigtails!" So this last photo is of what her hair looks like when we take the pigtails out at the end of the day.

Dear Kate,

This month, you fell in love with "Annie." I have been waiting for this day to come, and the fact that it has proves that you are my daughter, in case anyone had any doubts. I actually bought you a copy of "Annie" on DVD several months ago on a whim, but you had no interest in it, and so it's been sitting on the shelf, gathering dust. Then last week when we were packing to go to San Antonio, you were making me crazy by trying to "help," which means "take things out of the suitcase as fast as I can put them in." It occurred to me that if I could just get you to sit still somewhere for 20 minutes, it might fix everything, so just to see if it would work, I popped "Annie" into the DVD player, and you sat there in frozen wonder for a half hour, watching the singing and the dancing. When I turned it off to feed you dinner, you looked at me with your big brown eyes and said "Ahhhhnnniee!" And for the next 24 hours it was "Ahhnie!" every ten minutes.

Kate, when I was a kid, I watched "Annie" on VHS tape about 1.5 million times. I knew all the words to every song, and I proved it one time when my parents and my Aunt Merry Lynn took me to see a Hattiesburg Civic Light Opera production of "Annie," where I stood up in the balcony and sang along with the actors. They tell this story like it's cute, and all I can think is that they really should have made me shut up for the sake of the other theater-goers. Still, it was the highlight of my life up til then, and I wore the souvenir T-shirt I got that night until it pretty much fell apart. I think I still have it somewhere.

I used to wonder what in the world would induce my parents to attend a live performance of a musical they had been forced to listen to until they undoubtedly heard "Tomorrow" in their sleep. Now I realize that one of the unexpected joys of parenting is how much fun it is to watch your child have fun. It's why it is actually kind of awesome to do things like take you to Chuck E. Cheese, which I'd have paid good money not to do before you were born. And it's like that with Annie. I wouldn't be heartbroken if you didn't love it, but the fact that you do has let me enjoy it again, too. I think taking you to a live performance is starting to climb pretty rapidly up my list of things I'd really like to do one day, and if you stood up and sang all the songs I'd probably let you get away with it, too. That's how warped my brain is now.

This month, if you had your own Facebook account, as some of my family and friends have suggested you should, the things you would "become a fan of" would include: Annie, of course; ice, something you have become obsessed with eating; the garbage truck, which we are anxiously listening for right this minute so that we can run to window and watch it pick up the garbage cans; and dogs. Yes, dogs. No, we don't have a dog. But your grandparents do, and when we visited them this month, you basically relegated your human relations to second string and followed Maggie and Kemah the dogs around like they were celebrities and you were the paparazzi. You referred to them not by their names, but as "Doggy" and "More Doggy." We'd come back to the house after a brief absence and you'd start saying "Hi, Doggy! Hi, More Doggy!" as soon as we pulled into the garage.

I have to tell you, Kate, you're not doing me any favors here. Your daddy and I have a mixed-faith marriage when it comes to animals. He grew up with well-trained pure-bred Labs who lived in the house and were part of the family. Half of the Wachdorf family stories involve the dogs they've owned over the years. If you didn't know any better, you'd think they have a third daughter named Maggie. I, in sharp contrast, grew up in an outside dog home. We had two dogs and a series of cats over the years, but they all primarily lived outside. The last dog we owned was Avalanche, the world's dumbest but sweetest American Bulldog, who lived a happy life on 40 wooded acres, but was not big on baths and smelled like a garbage dump. Av made a game out of trying to sneak into the house, but was always evicted within minutes, with one notable exception. One time when your Gam and Geez were visiting Dan and I in New Mexico, they left Avalanche in the care of your uncle Ryan, whose entire job in dog-sitting was to feed Av and prevent him from getting into the house. Two days into Mom and Dad's trip, they got a call from Ryan, who, after some nice small talk asked in a casual sort of way "So .... how do you think you would get dog slobber out of a couch cushion?"

So I don't want a dog. I especially don't want a dog to live in my house. So far I have been winning this little standoff in our marriage because the score is Dan:Yes to Haley: Heck No, and I'm the one who will be cleaning up after the dog if we had one, so I get like one and a half votes. But now I'm outnumbered, and I should probably just start enjoying the golden years of my life without dog hair and flea treatments and late night trips to the vet. Your daddy's evil plan is working.

You got a lot taller this month. Little dresses that were kind of long on you at the start of the summer are now up above your knees. Meanwhile, you think you're getting bigger than you actually are. One day recently, you walked up and said "Hi, Haley," to me, like it was no big deal, just something you're trying out. This weekend you like the sound of "Hi, Dan." We're having a hard time not laughing when we inform you that you're going to be calling us Mama and Daddy for the foreseeable future. In just a couple of months you're going to be two, an age that sounds impossibly big to me. I have a two year old. And I like to watch Annie and go to Chuck E Cheese, and I'll probably have a dog one day. How remarkable, what one little person can do.

I love you,
Mama

This last picture of Kate was taken at Chuck E. Cheese, where she surprised me to death by actually dancing with the life-sized rat. I was terrified of that thing when I was a kid, and it's almost creepier now, because instead of a person in a suit, they have this giant robot version that just moves around on its own. I still think I was right to be freaked out.

One true fact absent from my recent letter to Kate is that a few weeks ago, I went out and bought a little potty chair for Kate to use. It was met with a lot of interest from her -- much ooohing and aaahing and flipping up and down of the lid -- but not much real grasp of what you're supposed to do with it exactly. This in spite of my best efforts to explain AND an Elmo's Potty Time DVD thoughtfully sent by Gam. (That's right. Elmo's Potty Time is now part of my film collection. We have excellent taste around here.) There have been some moments when I thought she was starting to get it, but overall, I think we might wait until we're done with some traveling we're going to be doing in the next month and then try again. No big deal.

As if to confirm my suspicions, a couple of evenings ago when I was making my nightly run around the house to pick up after the day's devastation, I came upon this in the potty. Yeah. I don't think she gets it.

I have really come to appreciate Albuquerque as a city a lot more in the last six months than I did in the previous six years of living here. Now that I'm home with Kate and we get out and do things, I actually have time to go and find out what there is to do here, and while the kinds of things I'm seeking out now aren't things I would have wanted to do before Kate was born, there really are a lot of public places that are very kid-friendly. This gets a city big points with me now. One of our favorites is the sprayground at the Manzano Mesa Recreational Center. I think these things are pretty common now, but I had never been to one in my life before I took Kate for the first time last summer, and it is so neat! It's basically a giant sprinkler system for the kids to run around in. So last Wednesday we met some friends and spent some time getting wet. Kate and I got there a bit early, and I was able to get some pictures before it got really crowded, which it does. That's understandable because it is HOT, people, and unless you can get wet, it's hard to want to go outside.

A lot of the sprinklers have fun shapes, one of which is a giant daisy. I kept trying to get a picture of it, but the sun was in the wrong spot and I was getting too much glare. Then I realized you could see its shadow on the concrete, and that shows you what it looks like.

Kate was alternately in love with and terrified of the sprays of water. She'd want to get closer, but then when it would hit her in the face she'd back waaaaaaay up and think about it for five minutes or so before she went back. So like her cautious mama.

My mistake this year was that we didn't go until pretty recently, and it closes down in August. But our pass is good through next year, so we'll be sure to take advantage more next summer. I am pretty sure my tax dollars frequently pay for things I either don't like or don't care about, so it's nice to have something like this for public use in the city. Kate is pleased to see her money spent wisely.

Dear Kate,

Today you are two years old. As I write this you are busy picking out your clothes for the day, which will apparently consist of a swimsuit coverup and a pair of sandals that really don't fit you any more. (Update: Now we've moved on to your new big girl velcro tennis shoes and a pink polka dotted outfit your Grammy sent you. We'll see how long that lasts.) Changing clothes and shoes is a big deal with you right now. Leading ladies in musicals go through fewer costumes changes in a day than you. And they can dress themselves, not that you aren't trying. Half the frustration in your life right now is about the fact that you can't handle buttons and zippers, but at this rate, you're going to have it all figured out by next week. Practice makes perfect and all.

You just got done spending four days with your Daddy while I was visiting with some friends in Minnesota. It was the longest time I've been away from you as well as the longest period of time you've spent alone with your dad, and I think you fared considerably better than I did. Based on Dan's report, it seems you were totally cool about the fact that I just got on a plane and left you for four days, whereas I had to stop talking to you on the phone when I would call home to check in because it made me feel so homesick to hear your little voice. I do think you missed me, because you were really excited to see me when I got off the plane yesterday evening, and squealed and danced and hugged me. You looked bigger to me and you knew a handful of new words, all in just a few days. That's really what it's like with you right now. Every day you learn something new or say something new. It makes it hard to remember what you were like even a few months ago.

This month, you have picked up a new hobby for me to supervise: Waiting for the garbage truck. On Fridays, the city dump trucks come to our neighborhood to pick up the trash, and this is the highlight of your week. If you were content to watch this amazing event from inside the house, that would be one thing. But that will not do. Not even close. So every Friday morning at about 7:30, we start camping out in the driveway to make sure we don't miss the truck. As soon as you hear the truck, which with your super-sonic hearing can happen when they are still blocks and blocks away, we have to go outside and start our vigil. I have learned that on Fridays, I better get my coffee ready to go and put on some decent clothes first thing, since we'll be greeting the entire neighborhood in the course of this little ritual. I think you are developing quite a following on our block, because all of our neighbors are getting in their cars to go to work around that time in the morning, and people take great pleasure in checking to see what you're wearing that day and waving to you as they drive by. You love that. But it pales in comparison to the fact that the garbage truck drivers not only wave to you from inside the truck, but one of them now honks his horn for you. I am not sure the other residents are appreciating that so early in the morning, but you are beside yourself.

The downside of this is that the city, having recently added recycling pickup services to the garbage routes, now sends two trucks, and they each go down the street twice so as to pick up the cans on both sides of the street. That means that we don't just have to wait for a truck to come once. No, we have to watch the truck four times in a morning. It becomes quite a production. I have started bringing breakfast. And a book. Because you never get tired of waiting. If anyone in the Albuquerque area wants to drop by for a chat, I have a couple of hours blocked off every Friday morning between 7:30 and 9:30. Come on by.

Back to your birthday: Really, you've been getting presents for about two weeks already, since I smuggled home some loot for you from your Gam and Geez after our trip to Mississippi and your Grandpa brought some gifts out on behalf of himself and Grammy during a recent business trip. Among those was a pink plastic doctor's kit with miniature doctor tools, including a fat plastic syringe that you have used to give your baby doll about 200 shots a day ever since. Apparently, you are very pro-vaccination, or perhaps you have just been watching too many news reports about swine flu. Either way, I doubt that poor baby doll is going to get sick any time soon.

Later today, we're going to have a little party for you, just the three of us. Strawberry cupcakes are on the menu, and your daddy is getting you a bunch of helium balloons on his way home from work. Your Gam and Geez sent you a bunch of new dressups (Fairy wings and tutus. I have a feeling I know what you'll be wearing to church for the next three weeks.) and your Grammy and Grandpa sent a little step stool, which you are going to love because it will enable you to climb up and "help" me with things in the kitchen. I may never get anything done again. Your Dad and I bought you an enormously tacky Dora the Explorer toddler-sized backpack that has wheels on it and a handle like a little suitcase. I would have preferred something without a cartoon character on it, since you don't even know who Dora is, but on the other hand, Dora has a monkey, and you are going to think that is just the coolest thing ever, so I got over myself and bought it.

Reflecting on the last two years with you is so surreal, mostly because I find it hard to remember that you haven't been part of our lives forever. I think I knew, holding you in that delivery room that night, that things wouldn't ever be the same. Everyone tells you that, and I didn't doubt it. What no one could ever have made me understand was just how much we would love you, how much being your parents would require of us, and how profoundly we would be changed in the process. It's probably a good thing I didn't know, because I would have been even more terrified than I already was. But if I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be this: "Relax. This is going to be the most fun you've ever had in your life."

And it has been, Kate. Happy birthday. I love you so much.

Mommy

Gig'em Aggies

Texas A&M 52 - Texas Tech 30

*This block has been hi-jacked by Dan. We'll return to our regularly scheduled blogging shortly.

Dear Kate,

As I start writing this, I can hear you opening the closet in our living room, dragging out a big plastic container that holds your dress-up clothes, and fumbling with the latches. You haven't figured them out yet, so in a minute, you're going to call for me to help you, and thus will begin the first part of a new morning ritual you and I have developed in recent days: Arguing over your clothing.

I sort of thought this was the kind of thing that would happen when you were approaching adolescence and wanted to wear skirts that are too short, but here we are, at two years old, and you'd be stiff competition for any 13-year-old pouting in a department store dressing room. Our conflict is about what you want to get up every day and wear: Your diaper, a pink mesh tutu, white dress socks, and black dress shoes. Sometimes you want to layer a red and white polka dotted skirt over the tutu, but most days it's just you and the tutu.These are adorable dress-up things, and it would really be fine with me for you to wear them, except that Kate, it's almost November. Yesterday, we woke up to absolutely freezing cold weather with rain and wind. Today it snowed violently for an hour. No matter what I do it's hard to keep our house warm enough. I've got on layers of sweaters and socks, and here you are, running around half-nude, like you're on a Caribbean island. You will not discuss the possibility of putting the tutu on over some warmer clothes. You do not want to hear about these things called "pants." And you are very particular about how the tutu must be arranged. The ribbon must be in the front. The flowers must face a certain way. You will not tolerate any irregularities of the tutu. It is like living with a tiny obsessive fashion designer.

Last night we had a breakthrough. Your Grammy Wachdorf sent you a box containing two super-cute knit dresses with matching footless tights, and you love them so much that you actually consented to letting me put one of them on you this morning. As of right now I'm still typing and you haven't come in to make your usual tutu-related demands. Maybe these dresses will save me from insanity and you from hypothermia. If so, I owe your Grammy big time. But these little episodes really just point to the big trend of the last two months, and that is You are a Big Girl. You want to Do It Yourself. You actually say that phrase all the time, except no one would ever know, because you pronounce it "I tay it!" (I do it.) From what I can tell, all this means is that you're right where you should be developmentally, and that's good. I want you to learn how to do things. You have a pretty independent personality even if this weren't the phase you would be in by default right now, so it's no surprise. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating sometimes. Learning to do things means doing them reeeeaaaaalllly slowly. Sometimes we're in a hurry. Sometimes we actually have to be somewhere at a certain point in time and space. This means nothing to you. You still want to put on your own socks (No Mommy! I tay it!), and it takes forever. I'm taking a lot of deep breaths these days. Counting to ten an awful lot. Trying to leave plenty of time for you to do things. Praying that I don't actually burst a blood vessel.

While our conflict level is definitely up this fall, so is how much real communication we can have, because you are talking so much. You never stop, even when I'm not in the room. You're puttering along, having a conversation with imaginary people about imaginary scenarios, and in those unguarded moments, it's been funny to me to hear my own verbal patterns parroted from your mouth. Apparently, when I talk to you, I end with the word OK a lot. As in "We're going to put on some pants now, OK?" I never realized I do this, but now I know that I do, because when you are playing, you end most of your sentences with "OK?" I also call you "Honey" a lot, especially when you're hurt. A few weeks ago, your daddy and I moved a dresser in our bedroom, and for the next two nights when I got up to go to the bathroom during the night, I ran straight into its corner because I forgot it was there. I got a massive bruise on my leg for that bit of clumsiness, and when you saw it, you said "Oh HONey! I get some me-cine. (medicine). Alll betta. (All better.)" You actually went and got a little bottle of lotion and pretended to be putting in on my bruise too. It was hilarious.

Here you are "reading" Harry Potter to Dangles. Or, as you call it "Parry Hotter." I'm reading it to your dad in the evenings, so you had to get in on the act. You are very dramatic when you read out loud.

Since I've talked about how you're being difficult in one area, I should probably be fair and mention an area of your life that you're suddenly being amazingly un-difficult about. Ready? Here it is: You're eating. Eating food. Willingly. And lots of it. I don't know what to do with myself I'm so surprised. It isn't that before now you haven't liked food. You like it fine. You just don't eat very much of it, and that is why when we go to your pediatrician for checkups, I don't even ask them to tell me what "percentile" you fall into on the growth chart anymore. After years of conditioning to think of numbers in terms of academic grades, it just makes me feel like a failure, and I worry that your doctor is going to burst into the room and demand to know why I have been denying you food. She never does that, of course. At all your checkups, we have the same two conversations. The first one is about how it's OK for you to not to be very big if you're gaining weight and not losing it. The second one is about how it's also OK that your head circumference continues to outstrip your overall growth. Seriously, it's kind of comical. I believe I may have recently used the phrase "Onion on a toothpick" when describing to your Aunt Hannah what you look like when your hair gets wet. Sorry about that. Clearly, right now you're having a growth spurt, and I'm having to constantly tell myself that this is what it is. A growth spurt. Not the Glorious New Normal where you eat like a human being and not a bird. This too shall pass. But in the meantime, we're getting a huge kick out of giving you food and watching you actually consume it. It's like a bizarre new TV show in our kitchen. "Kate Eats an Entire Turkey Sandwich." We are riveted.

The other thing I can see coming out in you that is allllllll me alllllll over again is the fact that you are pretty bossy. Yes. It was probably your lot in life anyway, since you'll be an oldest girl in birth order, and I think that just predisposes a person to lots of babysitting and the overpowering urge to tell people what to do. But there's no denying that you got it from me, and your daddy is having a big laugh over it, when he isn't busy trying to find things you took from him by force. Last weekend after we came back from Hannah and Daniel's wedding, we were having a lazy Saturday morning, and you piled up in our bed, where we were drinking coffee and talking. At first, you were content to sit between us and listen, but it didn't take long for you to start ordering the universe as you saw fit. You had to hold the plate with the bagels on it. You wanted to hold a coffee cup too but were overruled on that one. You wanted your legs covered up with the blankets, and directed me on how to arrange them for you. Then you turned to Dan, grabbed his pillow, and said "Daddy own pillow" as you took his pillow away from him. Yes. You get your own pillow, father. I need this one. That about covers your approach to most things these days. So we're talking a lot about sharing and asking for things instead of just taking them. It's slow going. You don't want anything to do with it.

But whether you want it or not, the world of sharing and considering others is coming to you, Kate. I've buried the lead a bit here, but the other big piece of news from the last couple of months is that you've got a baby brother or sister on the way. (At 14 weeks along, everything looks good.) He or she will be here in April, and we couldn't be more excited. I'm not sure what you understand about this news. You talk about the baby in the tummy a lot and when we pray for the baby, you reach over and pat my stomach. You consistently refer to the baby as "baby sister," which makes me nervous that you might not react so well should our new arrival turn out to be a boy. You notice other people's babies a lot, but I know that you can't really comprehend what all this is going to mean. I'm not sure I've got my head wrapped around it either, frankly. Two kids. What in the world are we going to do with two kids? I feel like I just figured out how to manage with one.

When I was expecting you, I spent a lot of time thinking about how you would change my life. I didn't know you, so I couldn't really think very concretely about what you would be like. Maybe it's because the new baby is such an unknown to me at this point, but this time I mostly spend a lot of time thinking about how he or she is going to change your life. While I know that initially, there is bound to be some struggle to get used to sharing our attention (not to mention your toys) my main emotion when I think about this is excitement for you. You're going to have a sibling! You have no idea what good news this is. Kate, as I've become an adult and my own siblings have too, I have found that my brothers and sisters are some of my favorite people in the world. There is a very powerful connection that comes from growing up in the same family if it's a loving family, and I want that for you. I want it for this new child. So that's why we're getting on the roller coaster again. This time around, I know what we're signing up for. I know now that there is almost no force of nature that can equal the chaos a newborn can bring into your life. I know what sleep deprivation is like. But what I know this time around that I couldn't have known before is how much we're going to love this new child. I know that because I know how much we love you. So here we go.

Dear April Baby: We love you already and can't wait to meet you. Grow healthy and strong. You have a lot of people waiting to meet you.

Love,

Mommy

This is a picture we emailed to our families in August to tell them the big news. Yes, August. I've been holding out on you, Internet.

Kate's hair has been growing really fast in the last couple of months. Unfortunately, it hasn't been growing evenly at all and one side of it was getting really long. As in, it was starting to look like a one-sided mullet. Then because her hair is super-fine and our climate is super-dry, she was constantly developing this epic static-induced bedhead that lasted all day. Here is a picture of one of her particularly egregious hair days, in case you don't believe me:

So I determined that it was time for a haircut, and yesterday was the day. I really didn't go into this thinking of it as a milestone, or an event on which to spend any emotion. Her hair needs to be cut, so we'll get it cut was the end of my thinking on the matter. Until she was sitting in the chair and the stylist started taking hair off the back of her head. Suddenly it looked like so much hair ... so much soft, baby hair. And she looked so grown up without it. I started freaking out a little. I probably would have cried if I hadn't had to stay busy helping the stylist keep Kate still and facing in the right direction. It took me completely off guard that I got emotional about it. I blame the pregnancy, mostly because I don't want to think of myself as one of these overly-weepy moms who will cry every time my child outgrows a pair of socks. I'm going to try to rein it in before I get that bad.

Kate, meanwhile, was a total adult about it. She sat in the chair so still, and really did a pretty good job of following directions. The stylist did a really nice job, and while her hair is pretty short right now, it looks so much healthier and since it's all one length, now it can grow without looking so ... truck driver-y.

Since it turned out to be a big moment, I'm glad I remembered to bring my camera. Especially because it gave me something else to do to avoid crying. Here's a before shot of all the hair:

During:

And various after shots. I have a hard time getting her to stand still when she isn't strapped into something.

Kate seems pretty pleased with her new do. Or her Chik-Fil-A meal. It's hard to say.

A video and, before you watch, a brief explanation below so you know what you're seeing.

Since we returned from Hannah and Daniel's wedding, Kate has been obsessed with recreating it in various ways. The things she was most impressed with from the wedding were Hannah's white dress and, obviously, the dancing. So in order to relive the moment, she has started going into my closet, dragging out this old white silk camisole and demanding that I put it on her. I have become quite an expert at tying it behind her back so it doesn't fall down. This she pronounces to be her "wedding dress." Then she has to put on my black high heels. She's actually gotten really good at walking in them, and although they completely slow her down, they are an indispensable part of the outfit. Then we have to go to the kitchen, turn on Feist's song "1 2 3 4," and do "wedding dancing." I was telling Hannah about this the other day, and I realized it sounds like something I'm making up. But I'm not, and here is the video to prove it. On any given afternoon, if you came over here, this is very likely what you would find us doing. We're a very festive bunch.

Alternate title: I am going to make a terrible stage mom.

As I may have mentioned 15,000 times or so recently, Kate discovered the world of dancing a few months ago when we went to a production of the Nutcracker. It isn't that she didn't dance before that. She's been dancing since before she could crawl. But watching a professional performance seemed to cement something in her mind, something about how you can dance and wear amazing outfits AT THE SAME TIME. And our lives have never been the same.

Thus, once we wrapped up our epic January travels, one of the first items on my list of things to do was to find Kate a dance class. This is partially self-defense. I'm 30 weeks pregnant and along with that comes a certain ... ungainliness ... that does not lend itself to a lot of dancing, especially not the kind Kate wants to do, where you spin around in a lot of circles that make me dizzy just watching. Dan is holding down the fort, but it's not really his area of expertise either. So it's basically imperative that we find Kate somewhere to get some of the dancing out of her system before she kills us.

On Saturday, we went to try out a creative movement class for two and three year olds at a local dance studio. We planned this out in secret and did not tell Kate anything about it until the morning of the class, because if we had, our day would consist of a constant loop of the following conversation:

Kate: Go dance class now?
Me: Not yet. Soon.
Fifteen-second pause ....
Kate: Go dance class now?

I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear that Kate loved it. She didn't really have the attention span for the more structured parts of the class, but I think that's expected in a toddler class, and the instructor was great about keeping things moving along and not worrying about making the kids all do the same thing. I am probably a bad mother for sitting on the sidelines and openly laughing at my child for running the wrong way, but in my defense there were other moms doing the same thing. And Dan was there to play the role of supportive parent who doesn't laugh at you, which he did quite well considering that I think it was his first dance class, too. Here's a clip of Kate obstructing traffic in the class. She's the one in the white dress.

She did eventually figure it out, and she was really proud of herself.

I think it's fair to say we'll be going back to dance class again. Especially since Kate's first words upon waking up from her nap the day we went to class were "Go dance class again?" Between the dancing and the singing, I am beginning to think I should start planning my life as a stage mom. Have I mentioned the singing? Because here is a video of Kate singing one of her original compositions at the dinner table. She sings songs constantly these days. Some of them are real songs, but a lot of them are just made up, and she sings all of them with such confidence that I sometimes think she's singing a real song that I just don't recognize. That is what happens in this video, and I want you to notice how in the middle, when I ask her what song she is singing, she ROLLS HER EYES at me and answers in total gibberish, but still manages to convey this tone of utter condescension. Like "Mother, I cannot be bothered with these trivial questions."

I am in so much trouble.

This photo and others by Daniel Meigs

Dear Kate,

Today you and I spent a morning at the park with friends. You are such a social kid that seeing friends is always high on your priority list, but usually if we're on a playground, you are content to hang around on one of the lower levels and chat with your buddies as they come flying off of various slides and ladders. You aren't a very physically aggressive child. You don't climb furniture or jump off of stairs, and you generally want to try new activities in short, controlled doses. That doesn't surprise me much, since I was a pretty cautious kid too, and between us your daddy and I played not one single sport in school. But I don't know where that child went, because today you were suddenly so brave. I could barely keep track of your bright pink jacket in the maze of the playground. You were climbing up ladders and squealing your way down slides you never would have touched even a few weeks ago. I have no idea what changed but it's great to see you have so much fun. And at the same time, like almost everything this spring, it makes me a little sad, because you're getting to be such a big girl, less and less of a baby every day. I knew that the change we would see in you between two and three would be pretty significant, but obviously I wasn't prepared enough. You're a totally different kid than you were even six months ago. Then you were two. Now you are two and a half. It is a big difference. My imagination fails me when I try to picture you at three.

Photo by Erika at My Little Garden

Frankly, I don't think you've been prepared for all the change either, and that has made the last three months or so an interesting study in how hard it really is to grow up. Your two most frequent verbal phrases these days best express to me the contradictory emotions I think you're feeling. Those phrases are "I do it myself!" and "I want mommy!" In the early part of this year, you went through a really clingy stage where you wanted to know where I was all the time, every minute of the day. It was really exhausting and surprising, since you are generally very independent. But you insisted that I be the one to bathe you, get you dressed, and comfort you at night during a two month period of night waking you went through after we did a lot of traveling in January. Traveling always messes up your sleep, and not to harp, but oh child, your sleep issues wear me out. When I talk to your soon-to-be-born little brother, I am promising him all KINDS of insane loot if he will just have some mercy on me and sleep. Just so you know what's up when I have to buy him a pony for his first birthday. Anyway.

You love your daddy, but for weeks and weeks, no one but me could do anything for you without you having a fit. At the same time, you were so difficult and so frustrated that you couldn't do everything yourself that our every interaction was a series of conflicts, or at least it started to feel that way to me after a while. I actually had a breakdown one night and told your dad I was pretty sure you hated me. Not being pregnant and irrational (and it's a good thing one of us isn't) he calmly pointed out to me that if you hated me, you probably wouldn't have such an intense need for my time and attention. Still, it was a rough month or so, and I'm thankful that in more recent weeks you seem to have grown past whatever you were struggling with. It's striking to me how often in parenting my job isn't really to do something to fix you when you're having a hard time as much as it is to be patient with you and love you through it. I never thought it was that way, and finding that it is makes me look at all the good parents I know as masters of some kind of higher level of patience I can only dream about. I hope I'm becoming more patient, but in the meantime I know I'm becoming better at apologizing. And you're getting good at forgiving me. So that's a start.

Photo by Daniel Meigs

Your love of the stage continues. Not that you have any official stages to get on, but you make them wherever you can. Dance class has become one of your favorite things in all the world, and if we're having a slow morning around the house, I've pretty much stopped even attempting to get you to put on real clothes, since I know you're just going to take them off, drag out your dress up box, and spend hours putting on different outfits. You have started raiding my closet to add grown-up items to your wardrobe, something I wasn't expecting until you were maybe 13 or so, and you are disturbingly good at walking around in a pair of jewel-encrusted high-heeled dress up shoes someone gave you as a gift. You have perfect balance. You don't even look at your feet when you walk in them. Kate, I have days when I can't pull that off, and I'm 30. You're making me look bad.

Your persistence is paying off, and you can do so many things by yourself. Some of them are really coming in handy. I was kind of annoyed when you started insisting on climbing into your car seat by yourself because it just took so long, but now that your brother is kneeing me in the kidneys on a daily basis I am thrilled that you can save me the trouble of bending over one more time. You can dress yourself, even if the process takes for-flipping-ever and results in the most unbelievable case of static hair the world has ever known. You routinely get shirts stuck over your head, but also preemptively decline assistance by screaming "I DO IT! I DO IT!" before I even offer to help you. Not that you are stubborn or anything. You brush your teeth really well, although this also goes down on the list of things you can make last for a small eternity. That's because there's a mirror involved, and to you all mirrors are an opportunity to .... practice singing and dancing. I just sit down on the edge of the tub and wait for your encore. On the upside, the dentist said you have remarkably clean teeth when we went in for your first checkup last month.

Perhaps not surprisingly, you are getting to be a great talker, and that is letting us hear more and more of your perspective on the world. You are currently fascinated with stop lights, and every time we get to one, you tell me if it's green, yellow or red, and what those colors mean. ("Green mean go, mommy. Go go! Red mean stop! Yellow slow DOWN!") I might have been about to forget those vital pieces of information, so it's extremely helpful of you to share them with me. At every stop light in the city of Albuquerque. Every time. Without fail. Green means go. Check.

Photo by Daniel Meigs

You really enjoy picking up new words and trying them out. It's one of the things that reassures me we might one day have some common interests. I love words too and when I was a kid I would collect new ones, the longer and fancier the better. On Sesame Street one recent morning the Word of the Day was "exquisite." When they do a new word on the show they say it a few times, use it in a sentence and then say "Say it with me!" You pronounce it "seskwizit" and you work it into conversations whenever you can. The other day I asked if your smoothie was good and you said. "Yes, it good. It seskwizit. Say it with me!" I kind of choked on my smoothie a little bit trying not to laugh at you, because you were so serious about teaching me this fabulous new word you discovered.

Now that your verbal skills are coming along so well I'm trying to get you to verbalize some danged manners. If you can say "exquisite" I know you can say "please," but knowing you are capable of doing something and getting you to do that thing are two separate affairs. Not that you are stubborn, I point out again. Sometimes I have dreams where I hear myself saying "Say please." This is because I say that phrase approximately 2,000 times a day in an effort to teach you that it is not appropriate to state all your desires as demands repeated incessantly, like "I want some cheese. I want some cheesesomecheesesomecheeeeeeeeeeeese!" Wait, what was it you wanted, because it's possible I misunderstood you. Something about cheese? Some days go better than others in this department, but just lately I am noticing that maybe one out of four times, you actually say please when you ask for something. Without being told to do so! You still basically expect whatever you are requesting to magically appear in your hands on the spot, but I figure this is a process. One thing at a time. Today, we say please. Tomorrow thank you. Maybe by the time you're 20 you will be fit for polite society. I know you'll have fabulous shoes when you get there, so I don't have to worry about that part.

Of course now that I am eight months pregnant, the $64,000 question is how are you feeling about the impending arrival of your new sibling? People ask me this all the time, and it's a hard question to answer. For a few months, you really didn't want to talk about him all that much. We'd bring baby Isaac up and you'd nod, but that was pretty much the end of the conversation. Since that phase coincided with your clingy, difficult couple of months, I really started to get worried that you were somehow upset about the baby. But recently, possibly because my stomach is so huge that it can no longer be ignored by your or anyone else, you talk about Isaac a lot and you seem excited. Just yesterday, out of the blue, you told me that when Isaac is here, you are going "show him Sesame Street and jumping." I have no idea what those two things have in common, but it's sweet to hear that you are thinking about the things you can teach him. I'm starting to get out our baby gear, and you think that is cool. You are really excited about giving the baby a bath in the kitchen sink, something you saw your Aunt Kelly and Gam do with Clark when we met him in January. These are little things, and they might not mean all that much. I'm still expecting it to be pretty difficult for you to adjust to having the baby around and sharing our attention, but I am feeling more optimistic these days that you will eventually get used to having a baby brother.

Interestingly, no one seems to ask the mom how she's feeling about having a second child. It probably seems like a silly question, and in casual conversation I doubt it would get many honest answers anyway. But I admit to feeling somewhat conflicted as the final weeks of this pregnancy come to a close. I am thrilled about your brother and am getting so insanely excited about meeting him that I frequently wish I could just skip this next month and see him already. Yet, at the same time it honestly makes me a little sad that these are the last days of our little family of three. The other night your dad and I went out on a nice date, probably the last one we'll be able to go on for a while after your little brother is born. One of the things I'm thankful to be able to say two years after the dawn of the child-having years of our marriage is that your daddy and I still have a great time together, especially when we find a rare moment to have adult conversations about issues and ideas and LOST and .... stuff that does not concern potty training. The magnitude of that accomplishment will not be evident to you until you have a marriage and kids, but believe me, it's a big deal. Still, even in our golden moments of grown up time we do talk about you, and the other night we were laughing so hard about something you had said that other patrons in the dimly-lit restaurant with white tablecloths and live piano music were turning around to look at us. We couldn't help ourselves though. We just think you're the funniest, most adorable and best kid ever. I gather from other parents that this is how you feel about each of your children, and I fully believe that this is exactly how I will feel about Isaac when we meet him. But you will always be our first child, the one who made us into parents, and that gives our memories of the last two and a half years with you a special place in our hearts forever. We love you so much and we can't wait to see you be a big sister. We know you will do it with all the flair, enthusiasm and fabulous glamour you bring to the rest of your life. Just please try to understand if Isaac doesn't want to wear a tutu every day. Boys are weird like that.

I love you,
Mommy

Photo by Daniel Meigs