{one}

My sweet little man,

Today, you are one year old.

A year. 365 days. Since we first met you. Since I first held you. Since I first stroked your hair and told you what a good, brave boy you'd been (I still remember your birth like it was yesterday). A whole year.

I don't know that there's anything so amazing as the first year of a child's life. You start the year tiny and helpless, unable to control your own body, unable to lift your head, focus your eyes, do anything, really, other than recognize your own hunger pangs or your need for security and closeness. And at the end? You laugh at jokes. You make funny faces in order to make others laugh. You take steps. You throw balls and catch them. You say dog and woof and meow and hi and hello and bye-bye and agua and all done and ball and apple and balloon and book. You give kisses. You feed yourself. You put yourself to sleep without so much as a whimper and actually sleep well. You have a lovey, a stuffed elephant that you hug to the side of your head and say "awww." You love being rough and tumble and like nothing more than to go down the biggest slides at the playground (again and again and again).

How is that possible? To go from where you started on your birth day to where you are today, your birthday? What an amazing thing it is, and how lucky am I to have gotten to witness every single day of it? The luckiest.

To be honest, this is one of those years where I wonder, "where did the time go?" I felt it, as the days passed, that so much of our first year together would be lost to the mute fog of forgetfulness. I knew I would forget so much of our time together that I made a point to be wholly IN as many moments with you as possible. I know, in those early days, how I sat and breathed you in as you slept on my shoulder, your warm breath on my neck. I know I reveled in the feel of your body in my arms. I know I drank up the site of your face, your smile, the brightness in your eyes. As easy as it was this year to be distracted, to be tired, I tried every day to give you 100% of my attention while I could, to watch you learn about the world, to see your firsts, to celebrate you and love you.

And even now, even with your first year so close to me, I know I've forgotten moments. Already. Forgotten them to the dimness of sleep deprivation and exhaustion. How paradoxical that we don't remember more of your first year--we were, after all, awake for most of it. Already, despite my determination to imprint each moment permanently onto my mind, my heart, already I look back and see only big pictures, the details blinking out one by tiny one.

What do I see, when I look back on your first year, then? There is, of course, the potential to only remember the challenges. Your last five months have been challenging, to be sure. There is the potential to remember only the illnesses, only the sleepless nights, only the tears and the frustration and the worry over your weight and your health. It would be so, so easy to have that be the overarching tone of our memories. But that's not it. Not for me.

I remember your smile. Your never-ending, ever-ready smile. Have I already told you that you were (are) the happiest baby I've ever known? You started smiling back at us at just two weeks old and haven't stopped since. No matter what day it was, no matter how bad you felt, how sick you were, how tired, you were always, always smiling. Even at the hospital, struggling to breath, you were smiling and trying to flirt with the nurses. The ER doctor called you a "happy wheezer." Through all the tests, the blood draws, the x-rays, the doctor visits, all of it . . . you smiled.

And your laugh? Oh, silly boy, your laugh is as easy and infectious as your smile. Your favorite thing to laugh at is still your sister, though I'm getting pretty good with your tickle rib and my funny faces and fake-out belly raspberries, and you and your dad like to make funny noises faces and laugh riotously at each other. You look for the delight in the world, and you always have. I don't even have to hope that you never lose that because it's just in you. You could no sooner lose the sparkle in your eyes or your funny big toe as you could your sense of humor.

You are my sweet, sweet, happy boy. Your sister can do no wrong in your eyes. Your daddy is your favorite play mate. And me? Oh, my boy, how you love on me. I am the one you seek for the hugs, the snuggles, the security of being held and loved and safe.

Today you are one and no longer a baby. With the steps you are taking now (up to four in a row!), I can no longer deny the "toddler" label. You play and you eat real food and you talk to us and tell us what you want. And you smile. And laugh. And bring us more joy than we've ever known. And this first year? With all its challenges and scares and long nights . . . it was full of so much delight. So many happy moments for me. So many times I froze time and shut the world out and existed with just you, just the two of us.

I know the second year is amazing. I know how much fun it is, and with a boy like you, a boy who finds the humor and delight in everything around him, I know that we have so much to look forward to together. I look forward from today and smile and know that we have something wonderful in store for us. And I know that our first year, though it's over and done, was the most wonderful first year we could have asked for.

Thank you for being you. Thank you for giving me the chance of a lifetime, to be your mommy, to experience your first year with you, to witness the wonder of you becoming you.

I am so, so proud of you. And oh, my sweet boy, how I love you.

Happy, happy, happy birthday.

Love forever and ever and a day,
Mom

Blaring and Bright

I know, I know. Long time no blog.

Things have been . . . well . . . challenging.

I know, if you're a faithful reader, you've noticed a trend in my posts over the last several months. Posts about finding out how hard things can be, posts about burning out. Being a full-time working mom with two young kiddos and a husband who travels frequently for work is tough shit.

But what about when one of those kiddos doesn't sleep? When one of those kiddos gets sick so often that he misses weeks on end of school? When he stops eating and his already low weight plummets off the charts and you spend most of your waking hours (a) trying to feed him, or (b) feeling your stomach in knots over his health, his weight, all of it. When that happens, the situation becomes one of survival.

Little man got sick. Again. And, like before, it was one thing after another, one thing on top of another, one virus taking advantage of an immune system left weakened by the virus that had come before. A tummy bug (terrible for weight maintenance, by the way), an ear infection, a resulting c-diff infection from the antibiotics for the ear infection. And no sleep. Sleep that came in 1-2 hour chunks all night long. Sleep that was worse than he ever was as a newborn.

Of course (of course!) this all hit at the worst possible time for TH to take off work, so the burden of care for little man . . . week and weeks of care . . . fell on me. We were zombies. The days I was able to work, I'm amazed I drove to the office safely. One day I couldn't remember how to spell "motor"--I was insistent that it was spelled m-o-t-e-r, and when my computer kept telling me that was wrong, I broke down into tears at my desk. TH and I sank, disconnected. We bickered. We fought. We resented each other--me for having so much of the waking responsibility, for having to miss so much work; him for having so much of the nighttime responsibility, something he took on himself out of guilt and responsibility but ultimately couldn't keep up with. Understandingly so. Baby girl kept asking why Mommy was mad at Daddy, why Daddy was mad at Mommy.

And through it all, little man was sick. Sick and happy. Always happy, that guy. He had so many tests run. Blood work and x-rays and cultures. Everything came back perfectly, wonderfully normal, meaning that there wasn't really any REASON he kept getting sick, he just had bad luck.

And one day I realized he was just spending too much of his short little life feeling bad.

So we pulled him out of school. He'd already been out for several weeks of April, and our pediatrician said the best thing we could do is have him out a couple of months, to give his immune system time to reboot and strengthen. I found a friend to come to the house to watch him in the mornings, and my boss allowed me to work half-days in the office and then the other half from home, which meant that suddenly I was working 8-hr days AND caring for little man an extra 4 or so hours a day. I would make up my hours during his nap times (which were woefully unpredictable) and then after the kids went to bed for the night. My life became even more stressful. The hour or so I'd previously had to myself in the evenings--to catch up on chores, dishes, laundry, spend time with TH, watch TV, whatever--was gone. I knew we had no other choice--we couldn't afford a full-time nanny and I had to come home to feed him anyway since he won't take bottles--so I tried to grit my teeth even harder than before and just.keep.surviving. The house fell into disarray with no one left with any time to keep it up.

Our lives fell into disarray.

And that's when we decided I'd quit.

My job. The thing that has given me part of my identity, that has challenged me intellectually, let me feel like a successful professional, brought me joy, allowed me to be the grammar nerd I love being . . . it had to go. Something had to give. Somehow we had to find more hours in the day, more time to take care of the things we weren't able to take care of anymore. We couldn't have it be so stressful every time a child got sick, especially if we have a child who tends to get sick frequently.

Two days ago I gave notice.

We don't have it all figured out yet. Little man is still not in school. I've lined up a part-time work-from-home job, so we'll have to figure out something for his care at least for the hours I'm supposed to be working. I'd love to have him back in school. LOVE it. I feel terrible for him that he isn't getting to spend his days playing with his friends anymore. But he hasn't had so much as a sniffle since being pulled out, and we're a little gun shy. So we're not really sure what to do there. Put him back in full time? Part time? Have someone at the house for the few hours a day I'll be working and then just continue to keep him home with me?

How will we adjust to the loss of income? I'll be making significantly less now.

We don't know. We don't know the answers to a lot of these questions. But we do know that in a couple of weeks, I'll suddenly have a lot more time to help us figure them out. The stress of "who stays home this time?" will be gone. The stress of "when do we find the time to do the chores?" will be gone. The stress of "when will I ever have a moment to myself again?!?!?" will be gone.

We aren't solving all our problems. We're just trading our old ones in for some new ones. And that's okay. We were pretty sick and tired of our old ones.

So how do I feel about all this? Mixed. I feel a sense of loss from quitting my job. I feel a bit panicked that I will go crazy staying at home. I feel guilty. Guilty for quitting. I feel like a quitter. I feel like I could have just kept surviving, putting one foot in front of the other, and then I wouldn't have to let my boss down, my team, my family's finances. I feel like I'm disappointing everyone. Like I'm tapping out. Like I couldn't cut it.

And then I think, who cares? Why am I so insistent on NEVER taking the easy way out? How many rounds did I go in this? Isn't it okay to tap out with my head held high after everything we fought through?

And I feel absolutely beside myself, giddy with excitement that things might actually, suddenly, very soon, be a whole helluva lot easier.

An email from a friend is helping me focus on that last one. She said, "the light at the end of the tunnel is blaring and bright!"

That was one long fucking tunnel. We crashed and burned so many times along the way. But my friend is right. The light at the end is blaring and bright. And so, so close.

We don't know what we'll encounter in that light, but thank God for the light at all.

(Oh, and hey, I'll be able to get back to blogging! HooRAY! Just in time, because little man turns ONE in two days, and I think my heart might explode from all the bittersweet.)

Isn't it amazing how quickly life can change?

Whew, what a ride it is. I'll take a smoother stretch for a while, thankyouverymuch.

Let's see what the light brings.