My baby is almost 1!
I’m totally stoked and also having kind of a hard time with it. I’m so excited and delighted by her every day. But she’s almost not a baby any more. She is too big for me to easily hold on my bad shoulder. She crawls super fast and knows the word “uh oh” (throw pacifier, say “uh oh”, repeat for endless good times!). She can stand for 20-30 seconds unaided. She waves “bye bye”, blows kisses, and throws her arms up for “so big”. She has two bottom teeth, and is growing four upper teeth at once. She loves all food – even sour kraut which I handed to her as a joke two days ago. She mostly cries if the food is done or the book is done – although she is becoming much more opinionated, and more likely to fuss, cry, and throw herself backwards if she doesn’t get to do what she wants – and she wants more and more exploration and freedom every day. As always, you are missing out horribly by not being able to see pictures of how doggone ADORABLE she is.
I think it’s normal to feel pangs as the baby gets bigger…especially when this is (almost certainly) going to be your ONLY baby. I also have a big girl, and she is mine but she was never my BABY. And I still have some FOMOS for not growing a baby. And I didn’t get a maternity leave, and I work so so so so much, and when I am at home my big girl demands 110% of my attention, and is super jealous of any time I spend with the baby. The baby is great, fine, thriving, growing, securely attached, chattering, babbling, and essentially fantastic. But I missed so much already, and I never got to spend the time to get bored with the baby, to be over it, to be READY to go back to work and have adult conversation and to really love my time away from the baby.
Not that everything was easy with baby-time, DO NOT WORRY, I have NOT FORGOTTEN! A friend just had a new baby and I had the simultaneous THRILL OF JOY and SHIVER OF SADNESS/JEALOUSY as I thought of that new baby… and then I also thought… wait, wait, wait, I GET TO SLEEP ALL NIGHT TONIGHT! Yes, miracle of miracles, at just about 9.5/10 months, BABY FINALLY STARTED SLEEPING IN HER OWN CRIB WITHOUT BEING HELD BY AN ADULT AT NIGHT! The relief. The serious, fucking, relief you gulls, I can barely describe it. I admit that I had an actual moment of hesitation about whether I would want another baby, because while I am constantly EXHAUSTED from stress, and emotional need, and chaos, I am actually NOT tired/sleep deprived every second of every day the way we were just a few short months ago.
Baby will even, (most times), sleep in her pack and play when we travel now! (Truly, there is no way we could handle another baby, but that’s because big girl X3 is 7,000 screaming monkeys worth of constant need, not because we wouldn’t want another).
We are now debating the 1 year old birthday party. Babies do not care about their birthdays – but WE care that we have survived ONE WHOLE YEAR! But we also are not even through the appeal process, and impressively, in the five months since parental rights were terminated the State adoption worker has started…as far as we can tell…NOTHING! We know the date for the appeal decision (look for update in November, friends!) and the court hilariously said that adoption could be “just a couple weeks after the appeal”…yeah right. The timelines we are hearing, and which seem to be true for us, look more like a year or so after TPR – so, we are hoping to adopt early next year. This is literally one of the fastest foster to adopt stories I have ever heard… and that is still going to be 1.5 years. So there is something hard about holding a birthday party for a kid that STILL is not ours – but don’t worry, she IS ours. If they tried to take her now (other than to return her to parents) I would have legal standing to intervene and argue our case and I have no doubt I would prevail. And, I have no fears of them being returned to their parents – I finally went and pulled all the court documents, and I now know the general history and, yeah, these kids can never, ever, go back there. Knowing only the little amounts I actually KNOW I cannot believe there was ever any question about it.
I was never a “baby person” – although more baby than kid, because warm sleeping squishy cuddly things are always easier than energy-sucking-perpetual-motion-machines. But we ALL wondered and worried how I’d take to having a baby. Pretty freaking great, actually! And, I’m just a little maudlin that this time I wanted so desperately, and only got to half-experience, is already coming to a close.
This baby though. This baby.