My Big Girl

Today Miss Kate is 11 months old. And even though in some ways I ask myself the age-old “where’d the time go?” question, in many ways I see how she and I have changed in that time and gotten more accustomed to these mother and baby roles.

Today for instance, we were at Ikea taking in all the Ektorps, Glinns, Fleeborks, etc., and I was hurrying us through since we were ‘threading the nap needle’ as it were. (We’d ventured out in the small window of time between the morning and post-lunch nap.)

Back home I made myself tomato soup and grilled cheese, and Kate had an assortment of various foods (cheese, tofu, spinach, chicken and stars baby food) that she was alternately eating and casually catapulting over the high chair tray when she thought I wasn’t looking. And there was just some weird air to it that we were like every other mother and kid eating lunch at home in the middle of a sunny day where not much is happening but sometimes no excitement is just fine.

And what’s weird about it was that it wasn’t weird to me at all. Sometimes my realization that I’m a stay-at-home mother comes at mundane times like those, and not when I’m doing something Hallmark like staring lovingly down upon her as she sleeps in her crib. (For the record, Mark and I are not Sleeping Baby Watchers, since we are too fearful we’ll be Sleeping Baby Waker-Uppers.)

So just that. It’s Thursday and God willing the lawn mower guy won’t wake Kate from her nap. When she gets up we’ll go to Chap House to visit Rose, and then we’ll come home and do the dinner-bath-book-to-bed routine.

The baby who everyone was certain was going to be a boy is getting to be a big girl and I still love her like a crazy lady. By this point I’m convinced it’s not just a new baby honeymoon phase kind of love, and that it’s how you end up loving your kid throughout their lives. But I’m holding out for the teen years to really put that concept to the test.