365 Days of Awesome

I don't even know how to process the fact that my baby, my smooshy, tiny (ok he was never tiny but STILL), helpless little baby is ONE YEAR OLD TODAY.  Truly, where did the time go?

I have gazillions of pictures of him to help me piece together his milestones and moments of amazingness and, as you can tell, I hardly blog anymore, but I felt it was worth the time to document where this little guy is at right now so I never ever forget.

We had his year pictures taken back in June both because I was going to be out of town for the entire month of July and our photographer is due with her second baby the first week in August and really didn't want to be taking pictures much further along than the end of June.  I spent a few hours on a cute little chalk board illustration highlighting his milestones and favorite things at "one year" and it seems I'll need to photoshop over it because SO MUCH HAS CHANGED IN A MONTH.  Now, I realize that with babies, lots changes in a month but this last month it was more like everything changed.  Unfortunately, his father couldn't go on summer sabbatical with me due to the whole JOB thing, so he missed all of these things but I pointed out that S-man sat, rolled and crawled to his Dada first as well as making Dada his first official word so I don't feel so bad for him anymore.

Since we've been between Matt's parents home and my Mom's the following things have taken place:

-Standing on his own
-Walking two steps
- Saying many words: Mama, Dog, Nana, Ball, More, Done
- Signing - he had all done down (in highly dramatic fashion, I might add) but now all of a sudden he figured out more, please, food and I thiiiiink thank you
- Clapping
- When I say "oh my goodness" he randomly started putting both hands on his cheeks
- Can officially signal a touchdown
- Figured out how to use stacking toys
- Got a little push trike and in one day figured out how to push along and today figured out the bell
- After observing my Mom doing Yoga every morning, he's got Down Dog mastered

I'm sure there's probably more...but holy crap!  I was just in shock that he was crawling so fast, how did all the rest of this happen so fast?!?!  He seriously went from a baby to a little man in two weeks flat.  Matt and I aren't sure if it was a new environment, spending more time with older kids or what.  Amazing, I tell you.

On top of everything else, he's really growing his own little sense of humor.  He laughs at his own little jokes and tries to get in on the adults' jokes.

I am a completely different kind of parent than I ever thought I'd be.  This little guy is my best friend and I don't like being away from him for very long.  I swore I'd start getting sitters right away and that hasn't really happened.  He'd probably do great but between his weird sleep schedule (more on that below) and the puppy being WIRED at night, it's more of a pain than it's really worth.  Luckily my sister lives close and we both babysit for each other when needed.  I also said lots of things about nursing, sleeping, noise during naps...threw it all out the window without a second thought.

I decided early on to utilize the Attachment Parenting school of thought because it appealed most to me.  There are moments it's hard, but co-sleeping has worked for us for the most part.  I've tried to move him to the crib and it's always been a miserable failure.  He's still not sleeping through the night (his one major flaw, I suppose everyone has to have ONE) and I'm still nursing him with no plans to stop anytime soon unless he decides otherwise, so sleeping next to him has been so so much easier than trekking upstairs to his nursery.  He takes naps there like a champ so at least there's that.  His sleep schedule while out of town has been JACKED and made worse by his first really horrible cold so hopefully when we get home in ten days we can get back to normal OR maybe decide to like sleep.  I have a bad, bad feeling this kid will take after my brothers and never sleep well.  Wheeee!

Speaking of sleep...imonna need some of that tonight.  Little man, in spite of all his beaming amazingness, decided to enter his second year with a whiny bang.  I blame it on the cold and pray I am right about that and it's nothing permanent.