Change

Dear Brooklyn,

It is approximately 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 10th, 2012.  You slept in until 12:30 today!  It poured buckets this morning and woke us both up at 6 a.m., so we made up for it by sleeping in.  It's the weekend, so your Daddy is at work and then I'll go to work this evening.

You are 10 months and 10 days old as of today.  I can't believe that you're almost to your first birthday already!  I feel like I've barely even blinked and the first year of your life is almost already over!  It was only a short six months ago that we were reveling in your ability to roll over all by yourself.  You are very busy these days.  You took your very first steps 10 days ago, the day that you turned 10 months old!  You've been close for a long time.  We went to visit my cousin Andrea and her little girl, Olivia, who is only a few months older than you.  You walked from Mommy to Andrea.  It's almost silly really, there are millions of babies in the world, and more or less, they all learn to walk, but I don't think I've ever been more excited about anything than your first steps!  No wait, your first steps are a close second on my excitement scale.  It's a close second to you in general -- the day we found out we were pregnant with you, the day you were born -- those have been the most profoundly exciting moments in my life to date.  And, as an added bonus, BOTH Mommy and Daddy got to see them!

I feel like I spend all of my time picking up after you these days.  The second that I put something away, it instantly becomes the most interesting thing in the room to you and is immediately pulled right back out.  So our house is always a little messy right now.  There are toys strewn about the living room and, right now, clean cloth diaper laundry as well.  It's all clean and in a laundry basket, but just hasn't quite made it back to your bedroom yet, so, naturally, you're busy pulling everything out of the basket and throwing it on the living room floor.  I don't mind though. :) One day, far too soon, I know there will come a day when you have found independence and I will wish that we could go back to these busy, beautiful days when everything was new and worthy of deep investigation through the eyes of a 10-month old.

I hope there will come a day when you get to experience chasing around your own 10-month old and, in those moments, I hope you remember me for just a moment.  Remember that, once up a time, when you were this age, your own mother deeply and intensely loved everything about you, from your tiny hands that moved the hair out of my face this just morning to play peek-a-boo with me, to your tiny feet that delight in nothing more than putting everything on the floor so that you can feel what it's like to step on it, to your 'velociraptor voice' that squeaks and screams at us until you get what you want, like after you'd thrown everything on the floor this morning from out of your high chair (bib and toast included!) and squeaked at me until I took you out.

I love you.