Yay! We're home!

We took another of our epic journeys to Pennsylvania last weekend to celebrate Christopher's first birthday with his whole family. His grandparents came down from up north, his aunt drove in from Philadelphia...everyone except for his uncle and aunt from Utah, who couldn't make it.
And there were the cousins.
My cousins have six children between them, including one that was born the day before we arrived. They love Christopher. They tried teaching him - "The sippy cup goes on the table!" opened his presents for him and were generally amazingly lovable and cute. Their mothers fulfilled their traditional duty of acting like older sisters and gave me more parenting tips than I would get from a year of Parenting magazines. And argued with me about my TV ban. A lot.
Friends of mine from high school came to the party. One is having a baby next month, one has no children, and another has one baby a month younger than Christopher and another on the way.
It was alive, chaotic and wonderful. My family loves to argue, debate, gossip about each other - sometimes all at the same time. It made me realize again how much I love them all.

P.S. Oh, and the face? Pretty much the same throughout the cake experience. I have the only kid in America who doesn't like cake icing.

Mama

He finally said it! Today, a few times, Christopher said "mama." And he even seemed to say it to me.
Of course, I immediately picked him and up and gave him whatever he wanted. Cause that's what you do when your baby says "mama" for the first time.

I want that!

I love reading. My parents say that when I was 18 months old, I'd carry stacks of books that were almost as high as me over to them. And I would sit there until they had read them all.
Christopher is almost a clone of Brian, but my reading gene apparently managed to sneak through. He loves being read to, so much that he will sometimes cry if you stop before he's heard the required number of Barnyard Dance recitations.
I like taking him to Borders. I like seeing him sit down in front of the shelves, pull books down, and then open them. He stares at them while pouting in concentration, like he's trying really really hard to make the magic work.
And, of course, there's always that small hope that he'll let me glance at my books on the way out.

Oh, that last dog? She was an accident.

Rory is our youngest dog. Rory is ... challenging.
If I sit down to read, play with the baby or watch TV, Rory will appear. She will lick my face, breathe on me, do anything she can to make it clear that she really really loves me, really really wants to be petted and oh-my-gosh, got so excited that she forgot the third thing, and ran over to bark at the dog three blocks away instead. (Usually she remembers to run around the baby on these occasions, but not always.)
We fostered dogs for four years. Rory was our 15th, give or take a few.
She was an amazingly beautiful puppy, sort of shy and very friendly. I figured we'd have her for a week, tops.
A year-and-a-half later, she was still here. She had made friends with our other two. She regularly stole things and ate them - our dinner, toothbrushes, five pairs of glasses.
But it was hard to let her go. I was eight months pregnant with Christopher when it came to a head for some reason. I realized I couldn't send her back to the fostering organization.
Rory had run over, panting and happy, as soon as she got back from a friend's house where she had stayed while I recovered from a late miscarriage. She licked my face, and for a moment, I felt better. She was there, panting, happy and always ready for a good, disgusting, slurpy lick through another miscarriage and what seemed like a year of unending grief. Her happiness never changed, even when we moved to a new house and upended her life, or lost our tempers and crated her for stealing vegetables.
Somehow, when it came right down to it, she had become part of our family - not something we planned for (three dogs is a lot of dog) or wanted, really, but there she was. Unplanned and part of our family.
Our little accident.

Crying.

Christopher cried when I left him at daycare today.
Ever since he started doing his separation anxiety thing a month ago, his day care workers have been distracting him or holding him when I leave. (On the days that he cares. Sometimes he is too busy madly crawling around the room and waving at his friends to notice. Those are the good days.)
Today, he was tired and I put him in his crib for a nap before I left. When I looked back as I walked out the door, he was standing in his crib, holding out his hands for me and crying.
And I left.
Worst. Feeling. Ever.