Happy First Birthday!

Baby C turns 1 tomorrow. Our home is in such upheaval with the upcoming move and full-force effort to get the house on the market that it would be easy to forget this day is actually upon us. And it seems like little C has been with us forever, so how is it possible we're just now celebrating our first year as a family of four?

Visions of pregnancy, water breaking and a spur-of-the-moment flight home from a business trip seem distant now. It's difficult to remember those as real events, not vaporous memories from long ago. It seems like a decade has past and that we never existed as a family without him. You can see why we feel this way when you compare these photos and realize how much growth and change has happened in this little boy's life in just 12 months.

Everything about C and his birth was a delightful surprise: His "early" entry into the world. The unexpected delivery tethered to a county hospital bed instead of our planned birth in a warm and intervention-free birth center. The fact that he is indeed a son with all of the appropriate parts. His delicate size of just over 5 pounds. His head full of inch-long black hair. His laid-back disposition and the fact that he slept. A lot.

And now, he is just our C. Adorable. Adventurous. Sweet. Stinky. Drooly. Snuggly. So loved. He likes to clap to music, try whatever foods we're eating, crawl around the house with his sister and dig in the dirt and sand, then taste it. He says: hi, hot, Ter-Ter, bird (ba) and da-da, which means papa, mama or L depending on the context. He signs: hot, more, all-done, milk, eat, drink, bird and dog. He moves: no walking, lots of crawling, standing and cruising. I wonder what the coming year will show us about C.