Letter to our 15 month old.

Dear William,

On 03/08/2013, you turned 15 months (1 year and 3 months) old.

For your 14 month birthday I decided that I wanted to take you to CaliforniaLand.  (Disney changed the name of it to California Adventure Park in the last couple years, but it will always be CaliforniaLand to me.)  Your father was working and so it was just you and me.  The first stop we made once we were inside was a visit to their child care center… I love Disney’s attention to their littlest visitors with these oasises in the middle of their parks, providing a dedicated place for nursing moms and diaper changing centers.  We walked through Cars Land, had lunch at the gas station cafe, saw Tow Mater, and then headed back home for your nap.  A short and quick outing, but we manage to do so much.

Another weekend we went to Pretend City with my mommy group.  You saw Liam and Alex again, it’s been a few months.  Mostly you were obsessed with the Cozy Coupe car and pushing it around.  You also really enjoyed pushing the dump trucks around in the sand area.  Oh, and let’s not forget the water area.  And the crayons in the art center you discovered toward the end of our time there.  OK, fine, you just really enjoyed every single part of the outing, from the toys, to the interactive activities, to watching all the other hundreds of kids that were there that day.

Valentine’s Day was this past month, your second one.  We love Valentine’s Day in our house.  Something that we’ve started doing for every special occasion is to stamp your hand and footprints… you are SO cooperative and are fascinated by the process.

We also went up to our mountain cabin this past month over President’s Day weekend.  It was a couple days after a headlining manhunt ended in a fiery blaze, and while the loss of life that happened as a result of that manhunt wasn’t a good thing, we were grateful that we could enjoy our weekend away in safety.  It had recently snowed, so we let you walk around in the untouched front yard and make tracks, and your father built a snowman in the front yard.

Your obsession with the Cozy Coupe car started earlier that week when you saw our neighbor’s.  You somehow took possession of it from the neighbor boy and pushed that thing all over the place and then, when they had to go inside for dinner, you had a complete meltdown mourning the loss of the car you had just discovered and already loved so much.  Lucky you, your cousins no longer use theirs, so I’ve been told that you’ll be in ownership of one in the near future. I’m sure you’ll be far more thrilled about that than all those “silly” clothes they’ve given you (that *I* love so much). That’s fine, but I aspire to teach you to show gratitude for ALL things given to you, regardless of whether they are toys or not.

You got your 2nd haircut this past month, it was long overdue and it’s amazing how much older you look now just from the simple act of framing your face.

We went to Chick-Fil-A one night this week and you sat there and ate every bit of your grilled chicken nuggets.  Then we took you into the play area and you played and played and laughed and laughed, and you didn’t want to leave.  I really hope that you continue to be this happy and sweet natured throughout your life.  You are such a joy to be around.  People can’t help but smile at your antics when they’re around you.

This month you’re measuring (as best as I can tell) 32.5 inches tall, 30 pounds 5 ounces.  You are wearing 2T/24 month size clothing, some 3T shirts, 6 EW shoes, 2T-3T socks.  Your legs continue to be a size shorter than what your girth requires for pants/shorts, so that continues to mean rolled up pant legs for you, or shorts in size 3T that are the right waist size but about 2 inches to short to count as pants.

Weird nursing by you has brought a return of my menses.  Probably not something you wanted to know, but I write about it now because it is completely mind blowing to me that the day it returned (03/05/13) was the first day of the cycle two years ago that conceived you (03/05/11).

This month shall also be known as the month that your father landed a full time job.  It’s a temp-to-perm position, and that can sometimes be scary, but I’m a believer in it because that’s how I’ve found two of the best jobs I’ve had in my career.  So now your father and I leave at the same time in the mornings, which is kind of hard on you because you were used to having some one-on-one time with your father each morning… so your Grandma D. has been reading books to you after we leave.  Just this week I started making a bowl of my steel cut oatmeal for you to have in the mornings since you love it so much, and I guess that’s kind of my way of “sharing” some time with you even though I’m not there, because that’s our special thing we do on the weekends.

One of your favorite around-the-house activities is to throw your ball (or anything) and watch it bounce on the ground.  Sometimes your ball disappears under the couch, and you vocalize your displeasure at this and lay down on the ground and look under there.  The other day, I was searching for something I could use to reach it and pull it out, and I saw your blow-up Southwest plane.  So, I asked you to hand me your plane.  You looked at me, got up, went over to your Little People plane, picked it up and brought it to me with a HUGE smile on your face. I thanked you, kissed you and asked you to get me your other plane.  You smiled, got up, went over and brought me the Southwest plane, grinning the whole way.  I found that i was grinning, too.

Developments – New words in addition to the words that are constantly in your repertoire:  Toes; Piece (as in piece of apple); “go go go”, “cook cooks” for breakfast cookies.
Makes animal noises: cats meowing (and hissing), dogs barking, birds caw cawing, monkey sounds.
Understanding:  Belly, ear, toes, penis (ha ha), hat, plane… there are so many things you understand.
Makes the sign for: “banana,” “more,” “hat” and “milk”
Teeth:  Lower right 1st molar, 2/24/13.  As is the way with teething, some days are “off” and you’ll randomly start crying in pain and be fussy, and then the next day it’s as if nothing happened.
Food:   You love a lot of different types of food, the list is endless.   And we discover new “loves” all the time.   The newest “love” we’ve discovered, coinciding with the use of our food dehydrator is  dehydrated food.  I guess I should just start listing the food that you won’t eat, so…. of all the food in the world, you consistently refuse to eat the following things:  eggs and carrots. Sweet potatoes are hit and miss.

Sleep:  Awww, sleep.  My obsession.  You’ve been sleeping well, despite everything.  I think you’d like to sleep longer in the mornings, these days, probably until 7:30 if I didn’t need to wake you to nurse before I leave for work.  99% of the time this month it’s been me waking you in the mornings, which is certainly a change.  Some mornings I’ll nurse you and you never fully wake up, so I put you back in your bed and leave for work… and sometimes you’ve slept until 8:30am.  The thing is, though, you’re requiring about 5 hours, sometimes 5.5 hours of wake time between sleeps, that is making for some long days for you.

Things I want to remember:  How you get the hiccups when laughing when you’re overtired.  The way you say either “Hi!” or “Boo!” when I come into your room after you wake up from your night or nap sleep. How insistent you are that we nurse the second I get home from work, as if you haven’t been fed a single thing all day long.  How cute you are when you go clambering up the stairs to get your diaper changed or go take your bath.   How when you hear an airplane overhead, you lean your head way back and look, and when you find it in the sky you smile and watch it until it’s out of sight. The way you grab your book the second we get in the car and the rest of the car trip, we hear you “reading” us your book.  How you come around corners and say “boo.”  How amazing you think “toes” are, and you pull your sock off and endearingly say “toe.”  How much you love your shoes.  That sometimes you just get quiet and look off into space and think about things… I wonder what you think about.  How you talk yourself to sleep, you lay there, completely still and practice your vocabulary, sometimes 15 minutes of talking… and if you say one word once, it doesn’t mean you can’t say it another 10 times in a row with different intonations.  (I will get this on video one day.)  The way you’ve started kissing my hand or my cheek, or how you kissed me on the lips once night because you’d seen your father do it… I was completely shocked as lip kissing my child isn’t something I ever planned to do, but YOU kissed ME!

When we used the gym’s daycare last month, we were asked to complete an informational questionnaire about you, and it asked us your eye and hair color and your father and I stood there, staring at each other.  Brown hair, brown eyes is what we came up with.  But it seemed so … odd… to reduce you to that. But there was no place to explain how the sun or camera flash turns your hair red, or when you are outside your eyes are actually a golden color.  Or the smattering of freckles that have suddenly appeared over the left side of your nose this past month, or how ridiculously long your eyelashes are for a boy.  Or the way a tiny dimple teases to come out and play on your left cheek sometimes when you grin.  Or how just the thought of you make my heart smile, and I find myself laughing about something you said or did for days afterward.  There was nowhere to write about the beautiful, joyous spirit inside of you that tries to sparkle through your eyes, and sometimes, when you’re really, really happy, the way your little body just VIBRATES because the joy is so big and you are so little, and the sheer FORCE of your laughter is just too much to be contained within you!  When you were just a newborn baby, I used to look at you and try to imagine what you would look like as a toddler, a young boy or an adult… now I look at you and try to remember the newborn face that was there a moment ago, before I blinked.  I’ve been trying to stop blinking.

Love, Momma