Smattery

I now have a one-year-old daughter, which is pretty unfathomable to me.

She can say “hi”, “bye”, “mama”, “daddy”, “baby”, “no”, “puh-puh” (that means “puppy”) and “buh-buh” (which means “button”) and just this morning I think she started saying “up”.
She crawls everywhere.
She scribbles with her crayons.
She dances.
She runs all around the coffee table and back and forth along the couch, but hasn’t quite gotten brave enough to try to walk without support.
She can sit by herself quietly absorbed in turning the pages of books, or she can work a crowd with her peals of fake-laughter and melodramatic gesticulation.
She hugs and nuzzles into my neck when she’s sleepy.
She points at everything that looks interesting to her and waves at everyone she sees in public.
She gets so excited when her Dad comes home that she repeats every greeting she knows — “hi-bye-hi-bye-hi-bye-hi-bye!”
She gets the giggles if she’s really tired and content and I’m rocking her to sleep.
She’s an adventurous eater (and even loves meat, much to my chagrin).
She politely says to herself “no, no, no” while reaching for the forbidden cords or putting crayons in her mouth.
She understands nearly everything that comes out of my mouth.
She loves the cats and all her stuffed animals, searching for their faces and giving them huge smiles.
She has seven big teeth in her toothy grin.

Nothing about being a parent has been what I imagined it would be. When I think back on it, sometimes I can’t believe I decided to have a child. I went through most of my life never planning or wanting to have kids and then suddenly I wanted one? How could I have taken that enormous of a leap of faith? I only had the vaguest ideas about what my life would be like, and none of them were really right. I guess the human instinct to reproduce can be a very powerful thing.

Of course, now that I know what I know, I’m incredibly glad I naively jumped into the whole idea of having a baby. It’s addictive and refreshing to love someone so fully without any reservations. In the midst of everything bad going on in the world, it feels good to be constantly impressed by someone. It feels good to know that there’s someone out there for whom I would do anything, without question, without even thinking about it.

It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses and bunnies. In the first four or five months, when I had postpartum depression, there were far too many days when no matter how hard I tried, I’d try to imagine the next day and I’d just see blankness, as though I wouldn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t suicidal, but simply couldn’t imagine living anymore. It was scary. But having lived through that, it’s pretty easy for me to keep my perspective on the days when Eva’s fussy or I’m tired or just sick of the drudgery of taking care of a baby. The good moments so vastly outweigh the bad moments.

And there are lots of little things about our daily life together that are just getting easier and more fun every day. Taking care of Eva is getting easier. Balancing work and family is getting easier, especially now that Brad is working some new hours at work and he’ll actually be home during Eva’s awake time in the evening. Eva’s on the cusp of walking and the calendar is moving ever closer to spring and I’m imagining what it will be like to have a toddler this summer.

Life is so good right now.