Every Little Wonder

A couple weeks ago, Ezra said his first real word: car. Or “Ca! Ca! Ca!” shouted at every car that drove past us as we were sitting outside of Starbucks on a Sunday morning. The next day, he ran up to me as I was cooking dinner and started pointing wildly at the block of cheese on the counter and making the sign for ‘eat’ while saying “shees! shees!” Car and cheese. That pretty much sums up the priorities in his life right now. I could pretty much die from how adorable he is when he’s getting all excited over cars and cheese.

When I was pregnant, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to freak out over milestone stuff—that whether my baby was fast or slow at walking or rolling over or talking or whatever, it wouldn’t be a big deal, because it all works out in the end and there’s no use stressing over it. Come kindergarten, it doesn’t really matter who was running across the living room at nine months and who was taking their first timid steps at fifteen months.

I’ve been pretty good about this so far. Mostly. But all the froufrou ‘what, me worry?’ nonsense meant nothing when all the baby development guidelines were telling me my 15-month-old son should be saying at least three words and I knew he wasn’t saying any. Or when my friend’s eight-month-old was already saying mama and dada .

So maybe I was freaking out. A little bit. But I tried to keep it down because obviously Ezra is a crazy awesome genius. He’s smart and social and expressive and he babbles all the time omg nonstop and his receptive vocabulary is pretty darn huge. Deep breath, lady.

So I just kept waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

And then when he was happily yelling at the cars, I didn’t even realize it at first. He was pointing at every car and it still took me forever to connect the dots. Oh! Car! He’s saying car! And I realized that he’s been making that sound a lot lately so… I just totally missed it. I have no idea what other words I’ve missed—he’s being raised bilingually so I wouldn’t even understand any Spanish words he tried to say. And now I feel like a bit of an idiot.

But my kid? He’s a frikken’ genius.

BONUS VIDEO for making it to the end of this post: Ezra ‘talking’ on the ‘phone’:

Ezra is amazing.

It’s such a crazy age, right around now. He wants to be everywhere, at once, and he usually succeeds. Nothing is interesting for more than a few seconds. He loves food one day and hates it the next. He has a constant death grip on one of my fingers and he never wants to be alone and he wants to play in the cat food or bang things on the tv or stand at the front door and jiggle the knob (He can reach the knob now? Wait, what? When did this happen?). He’s teething, like all the time, 24/7, hardcore. It makes him fussy and whimpery, but he’s handling it way better than I would, so I can’t even complain. I don’t want him to watch much tv, you know, but sometimes I just wish he would anyway. I wish I could just curl up on the couch with him and watch—I don’t even care. Thomas and Friends or Dora or whatever, anything, just so we could sit still for more than 30 seconds. But TV is so boring, mom!, and there’s a ball of loose cat fuzz on the carpet that needs to be inspected and DVDs that need be thrown off the shelf and…here we go, nonstop party time, and didn’t you know, naps are for babies, mom!, let’s go go go!

But, goodness, he’s just delightful. He’s finally starting to walk, little cautious steps, looking for approval the whole way. He stops to clap for himself after a few steps and squeals with delight. He’s so happy, so loving, so sweet. So full of excitement and laughter. He sings along and dances and claps whenever he hears music. He plays pat-a-cake games and chases the cats down so he can hug them and he growls like a monster when we’re having tickle fights. He’s a charmer, a total flirt with the grandmas in the grocery store aisles. He loves staring at our faces and trying to figure out where the nose is, the eyes, the mouth… he loves his belly button and he loves having his head rubbed and his ears cleaned. He’s obsessed with brushing his teeth, or at least with chewing on the toothbrush for hours.

And sometimes, right in the middle of the baby-step-taking, cat-chasing, teeth-brushing, dirt-eating, breathless-laughing, living-room-destroying, nonstop BabyPartyFest, he comes up to me and wraps his little arms around me and plants a big juicy kiss on my face and buries his head in my neck, and…yeah. I knew when I had a kid that I would love him like crazy of course, but I didn’t expect it to come in fits and starts like this. One minute you’re on the ground playing with a toy car and trying to figure out what to make for dinner and thinking about how tired you are and all the bills that need to paid and who’s going to clean the dishes and and and… and then bam, a tiny crazy monkey baby is dangling from your neck and mushing his face up against yours and suddenly you can’t even breathe because you’re heart is just exploding right out of your chest.

Happy birthday, my dear, sweet, amazing, perfect little boy.

I don’t have words big enough to express how I feel about you. It’s a lot like love, only it’s more like love times infinity to the moon and back again. Plus a million. And then some. They day you were born and they first laid you on my chest, I thought my heart would explode from love. I thought it was stretched to its very limit and I couldn’t hold even a smidgen more of love. But somehow, it did. Somehow, every day, my love for you grew. My love for your dad grew as I watched him be an amazing father to you. Every day, my heart gets bigger and bigger. I don’t even know how I’m able to stand up anymore with all this fierce love coursing through me.

You lean in for cuddles, you zoom around the house begging us to chase you, you give us big sloppy kisses, you babble for hours and hold our hands and clap and dance whenever music’s playing. You are so funny and charming and sweet and brave and strong. You’re the happiest person I’ve ever met.

This year has had its share of challenges and worries, but it’s been the most rewarding, fantastic year of my life. It’s such a pleasure and a honor to be your mom. Sometimes I feel as if a silly little girl like me hardly deserves all this happiness, but when you clasp my fingers and cuddle into me and plop a big kiss on my cheek, I realize: we were meant for each other. You, me, your dad. All of us. We were meant to be a family. This little, perfect family.

I love you, little monkey.

Despite the sleep exhaustion all around, we’ve had a pretty easy 11 months here. One bout of pukiness and Ezra’s dedication to finding new ways to scratch himself no matter how often I trim his nails—that’s about all I’ve had to really worry about so far when it comes to my preshus widdle baby.

Okay, there may have been that time where I closed my eyes for a second and he decided to leap off of the bed head first.

And there may have been that time where I noticed mysterious purple dots all over his face and became convinced he was DYING. RIGHT NOW. OMG. CALL 911!!! (thanks, Dr. Google!) before my mom shoved me to the side and wiped the blueberry splatters from lunch off his face. While maybe rolling her eyes at me a little. But hey, I’m not the one who didn’t clean him up after feeding him neon-colored food!

But otherwise? It’s been pretty smooth sailing.

So when I put Ezra in his high chair on Saturday morning and walked into the kitchen to get his food, I was totally unprepared for the huge crash I heard behind me. For all the unthinkable thoughts that rushed through my mind in that split second of terrifying silence as I rushed back into the room. And then the crying. Oh, the crying!

Ezra had kicked off of the dining table and thrown himself backwards, into the shelf behind him and the floor beneath.

He screamed and screamed and screamed while I tried cradling him close and calming him down. And after 5 or ten minutes, I finally found one of binkies and tried giving it to him. He took it and immediately started to fall asleep.

And that’s when I really started to worry. Because this baby? He never immediately falls asleep. So I took the binky away and tried to call the on-call nurse with a sad, hurt, crying baby right next to my ear.

I was really, really expecting them to say “Oh, he’s fine! Relax! Don’t worry about it.” But after putting me on hold to talk to the ER doctor, she said I should bring him in.

To the emergency room.

You know. The room for emergencies. Like the one going on right now. With my baby.

You know. The bright, shining, happy little center of my world.

OMG.

I called Cris at work and five minutes later he was home, all worried and teary-eyed (manly tears!) and we rushed the still-crying baby to the emergency room.

And then we waited for a hour. Of course. Is there anything in the world worse than an emergency room on a Saturday morning? If there is, I don’t want to know about it.

The doctor decided to keep him there for a few hours of observational instead of doing an MRI. Which is cool, ‘cause I really don’t want my baby to die of cancer, but man, those few hours sucked. Hard. There is nothing about a hospital bed and a plain, gross room that makes an upset, hurt, starving, sleepy 11-month-old feel better in any way.

At one point, a nurse came in take us the basement for his x-ray, despite my insistence that he wasn’t supposed to have an xray. We sat in that waiting room for 30 minutes before she realized she was mistaken and sent us back.

And then shortly after, another nurse came in to prep him for his MRI. And then I had to get all NO HE IS NOT HAVING AN MRI GO TALK TO THE DOCTOR FIRST NOW PLEASE.

So eventually the doctor came back, said Ezra seemed fine, and then told us to leave before they tried to get us to have any other unnecessary procedures.

Kaiser Oakland? You suck.

But my baby’s head is still fully functional, so I’m counting this weekend as a Win anyway.

Good job, awesome little toothy daredevil guy!

Things are slowly settling into a new kind of normal around here.Despite the occasional bout of nearly homicidal road rage, the commute is getting more bearable. Or less unbearable, depending on how you look at it. I’m looking for a commute buddy to make the daily drive less expensive and painful and I’m adjusting my hours to try to beat traffic a little bit. We’ll see how it goes, but at least it’s going.

And on the wildly positive side, getting home in time for us to both spend a couple hours with our pweshus widdle baby before putting him to bed at night is totally wonderful. We’re actually able to come home and, like, do stuff. Like cooking (yum!) or cleaning (ha!) or crawling around the floor chasing Ezra or even, gasp!, going out somewhere! It makes me feel all wild and heady and free.

And Ezra? Well, in addition to learning to crawl, he went and sprouted two delightfully chompy little teeth at he same time last week. Which may have contributed to the very sleepy and grumpy week for everyone involved. You know, maybe.

Oh, Ezra. Just when I’m feeling all mopey and grumpy, you go and do something adorable and awesome by just up and crawling across the living room.

I knew there was a reason I liked you!

I’m just going to pretend it’s not already Wednesday (Wednesday? What? How on earth did that happen already?), and do my weekly wrap up now. Only it’s supposed to cover two weeks. I’m not doing this right, am I? Oh well. Carrying on…

• Ezra said dada and then mama, back to back. True Story. We were listening to him babble away in bed between us on Saturday morning, when he oh-so-clearly said dada, and we got all excited and silly about it, and I said No, say mama! And then? He said mama. Awesome! He then went on to make a bunch of other sounds that are probably only understandably to certain African tribes so I’m pretty sure this moment wasn’t as momentous to him as it was to us. But whatever, my baby said Mama!
• Over Mothers Day weekend, we also took Ezra into the pool at my mom’s house for the first time. He was very quiet and a little cautious when I first carried him in there, but after a few minutes he realized he could SPLASH! and SPLASH! he did, full of giggles and shrieks. My stepdad is a swim instructor, and he had Ezra doing mini leg-kicking laps around the pool and even put him under water a couple times. He handled it like a champ, of course—just one short yelp of displeasure as he came out of the water to let us know he wasn’t too crazy about water in his eyes, and then he was back to playing and splashing. It was ADORABLE.
• I went to the doctor for the lingering pain near my c-section incision. Turns out I’m totally fine! Uh, just ignore the stabby feeling in your abdomen, it’s nothing! YAY DOCTORS. Someone on twitter mentioned that her residual pain was likely due to belly flab, and, yeah, I can see that being the case since I’m approximately 90% belly flab. (I was hoping that getting pregnant would cause fat to magically migrate to my ass, but NOPE. I still have no butt.) So I’ve been trying to get a littttle more serious about eating better and working out. I’m bad at stuff like this and I desperately wish I could go on ignoring it and be all rah rah me! but I need to lose weight and it is what it is, so I guess it’s about time I put on my big girl panties and deal with it.
• It was my first Mother’s day and real, actual mother. We spent the weekend at my mom’s house. She watched the baby overnight so we could go see a late showing on Iron Man 2 (Robert Downey Jr, will you marry me?) on Saturday night and then I got a solid block of much-needed sleep. Woke up Sunday morning to a kiss and and a hug and a sweet “happy mother’s day, new mommy” from Cris, and then cuddled with the baby for a while, and then we all had a nice bbq. All in all, it was a lovely day.
• I realized that I don’t think about how completely WEIRD it is to be a mother as much anymore, so I guess I’m finally settling into my new role. I am so blessed to be a mom to the most amazing kid in the history of kids. I know all moms think their kids are the best, but in this case, I’m totally 100% objectively right.
  

Goals this week? None. I’m taking a break and catching up on Glee and Parenthood. Priorities, people. I haz them.