melted smoosh

dear Sweetpea, December was such a special month! you love all the Christmas lights and decorations, especially the garland on the stairs and the lights Daddy put up on the house. a few weeks before Christmas, we took you to see Santa and you didn't even flinch! you loved the soft fur trim on his red velvet coat. he talked to you quietly for a few minutes by yourself, and then he talked to all three of us and told us not to blink because it all goes so fast. oh, sweetpea, how true that is! and yet, i can't be too nostalgic, because each new day we see more and more of you , and that makes every day feel like Christmas.  our next big adventure was flying to Seattle the week before Christmas to visit family and celebrate John and Genesis' wedding on December 22! you occupied yourself on the flight with reading your ladybug book from Grammy Kim, coloring in your new Rudolph coloring book and playing with the stickers, and scrubbing down everything you could reach

our beautiful Greta Kathleen. this past year has been filled to the brim with precious memories. it seems like we've barely blinked for the past twelve months, and yet here you are, one year old, and you keep on growing and changing every day. it shouldn't surprise me. that's what babies do: grow and change, grow and change, and it's thrilling and exciting and a little bit sad, all at once. your sense of humor is growing too, and over the past few months you've become much more smiley and interactive with friends and strangers. here's a look back at the first year we've had the delight of knowing you. you took your first steps just a week before your birthday, and you do the best walking when we can distract you from the fact that you're not actually holding onto anything. you emphatically sign "please" now for anything you want, and sign "more" and "all done" (usually while saying a singsong "ahh-duh!").

dearest Sweetpea, what a big girl you are! the very  day  after i announced via your 10-month post that you weren't pulling up to stand by yourself yet, you decided to prove me wrong. while you were playing in our family room (with Nana and Pappy here), you crawled over to the recliner and pulled yourself up like you'd been doing it for years. now you can balance without holding on to something for several seconds at a time -- longer if you're distracted by a toy. my favourite is whenever i have you stand on the changing table while i button your pants. you usually steady yourself against my shoulders for a few seconds. then you let go and stand there with a huge grin on your face, and finally you smile even wider and slooooowly let yourself tip forward until your forehead touches mine.  you pull a lot of silly faces these days -- the Zoolander "Blue Steel" face, the gruff old man face (you pull your bottom lip up over your upper lip), the cheesy

yeppppp, i went there with the cheesiest title imaginable for this little post about our trip to Bethlehem, PA last weekend to celebrate our fourth anniversary. it was such a good time. i think we probably would have had a phenomenal experience anywhere we had a whole 24 hours to ourselves, but when you throw in Oktoberfest and a bunch of museums? homerun for the Wills!  my vacation-planning style is equal parts Hardcore Booking Everything In Advance + Let's Leave a Little Free Time to See What Tickles Our Fancy. aka i spend ridiculous amounts of time on Trip Advisor poring over hotel reviews and coming up with a rough framework for activities before we leave, but if we stumble across something more awesome when we're actually there, well then it was Meant To Be. sadly, there weren't any rooms left at the historic Hotel Bethlehem when i started sleuthing last month, since our trip happened to fall over Columbus Day weekend. i'm determined to go back at some point and

' dearest sweetpea, you are such a little person now! walking and talking are the only things holding you back from full toddlerhood, and it's amazing (and a little bit terrifying) to watch how quickly you're developing beyond the tabula rasa of babyhood. you're now crawling all over the house, pulling up to your knees, cruising along the furniture if we help you stand up, and somehow, consistently intrigued by the most dangerous or messy things you can find (Kaiser's water dish, the grate under the refrigerator, cupboard doors and the contents therein). you're still rocking the two-tooth grin, but your mealtimes are beginning to follow a more grown-up routine. you drink a 5 oz bottle as soon as you wake up, followed by a breakfast of pureed fruit or oatmeal, then an hour later or so you'll feed yourself scrambled eggs or more fruit. you get another bottle around 10 or 11 am, then blended veggies, our leftovers, or a jar of a Gerber meat dinner.

i want to remember always the weight of your head in my palm, the trusting fullness of your tummy tucked in the crook of my arm; your little murmurs of satisfaction and your butterfly hands flittering up to my shoulder, then weightlessly floating back down, your exquisite earlobe moving back and forth with every swallow. i want to remember always the way your chest rises and falls like a little bird and how, when you fall asleep, you turn your head and purse your perfect lips and stop breathing for an endless moment and then sigh, and i curl you up to me, cradling all of you, all you are now and all you are going to be, and then softly lay you down in your little bed. you stretch into a snow angel. 

it's a quarter past ten on Monday morning, and instead of reviewing lab results, palpating an abdomen, filling out medical necessity forms for diabetic supplies, or anesthetizing an abscess before performing an I&D, i'm home. greta just finished an entire trayful of scrambled egg bits and i took her upstairs to read Guess How Much I Love You  (a baby shower gift from Jon's mom!), laid her in her crib in her t-shirt and FuzziBunz diaper, and tiptoed out of the room with her laundry basket. but instead of throwing her clothes in the wash, i'm writing. the breeze is barely rustling the leaves on the big tree by the garage and a mourning dove is cooing, a sound that always makes me think of Camano. bertram is perched on the counter like a little orange owl, blinking slowly at the quiet kitchen. kaiser has squashed himself into the corner between the back door and the closet so he can take a snooze, assured that no intruders can sneak up behind him. and a few halfheart

dear Sweetpea, i think August may have been our most exciting month yet! technically speaking, the action started the last few days of July when your great-grandparents Wayne and Janeen came to visit on their way back to Massachusetts. they brought you a bear that plays peek-a-boo and you were enthralled with Gramps' Donald Duck voice and Janeen's nursery rhymes. you are so lucky to have three sets of great-grandparents still living!  on the last night of their visit, we discovered that your first tooth had popped through -- at age 8 months and 3 days, to be exact! you celebrated by devouring a few rice rusks ("mum-mums"). your second tooth made its appearance two weeks later. you've had a few fussy days and some night-wakings, and if you're really miserable, some Tylenol calms you down, but you're still generally your happy little self! you love to feed yourself peaches, bananas, cucumbers and plain pasta, and we puree our dinner leftovers