birthday | Barefoot in the Kitchen

Dearest David

At 3.14pm today you turned one year old. My word.

This has been an awesome month. You’re still sleeping well, and having two or three solid hours’ sleep in the morning, and an hour or two in the afternoon. This makes you happy and bouncy and full of energy when you’re awake, until you crash and fall asleep again: you’re hardly ever grumpy and tired. You also like people other than Daddy and I. This is a relief, I can tell you.

You’re still a fussy eater. You won’t eat ANY fruit unless it’s pureed: if it’s not, you poke it and look disgusted, and refuse to put it anywhere near your mouth. Vegetables are similar, but you do at least eat potato, peas, and carrots mashed together, and vegetable soup. However, bread, biscuits, breadsticks, and ESPECIALLY garlic bread go down very well, as do Swedish meatballs from IKEA. Oh, and chocolate birthday cake.

You’re getting better at walking: you can do it when you forget to be scared! I don’t think your current growth spurt is helping, because it makes you fall over all the time. You’re also too lazy to try sometimes: why bother when you can speed-crawl?

Daddy has been working a lot this month, and we haven’t seen him as much as we’d like. You miss him dearly when he’s away, and you’ve figured out how to press the redial button on the phone so that you can talk to him. (This means we need to keep his number as the last-dialled, so that you don’t confuse anyone else.) When you’re together I no longer understand what you’re both on about, you’re so much on the same wavelength. It seems to centre around fart jokes.

You play like a toddler now. You sort things into groups, put things in places, try to fit one thing inside another or stick things together. You are starting to use language and sounds to describe what you’re doing and what is happening around you, too. New words this month include “Stop!” “Go!” “ERIC!!!” and too many others to count. Eric prefers to hide (currently under the Christmas tree, which has the added bonus of things to BAT!) than to play with you.

You now travel in the front of my car. I was getting fed up with the back of the passenger seat being kicked! You have much more room in the front and you stay still while I strap you into your seat. We then have a conversation until you fall asleep without a fuss, and I find myself talking to myself without realising. When a traffic light turns green, you shout “GO GO GO!!!”. (You have also done this when we followed an old lady in her Nissan Micra. I’m teaching you patience, honest!) The view in the front is much better than the view in the back!

You’ve had two birthday parties so far, and a constant stream of presents over the last few days. That’s what happens when your birthday is so close to Christmas! On Sunday we went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house and had cake and presents there, and today Kathryn and Harry and Benjamin and Naomi came to visit at Nana and Grandad’s house. When you wake up from this nap you can open some more presents! (And tomorrow, and the day after, and probably the day after that. That’s why we’ve brought Daddy’s car down to Kent and not Mummy’s!)