Dear Ingrid,

You are 11 months old today?!  I’m not sure how that happened so fast, I say it every month, but really, it’s incredible.

You managed to avoid the flu that felled your dad and I, and when daddy was sick with pneumonia, I got to get you up and off to daycare in the morning. It was nice to see how happy you are when you’re dropped off, and how happy your teachers are to see you. 

We also went to the mountain for the first time with you. The last time I was there, you were just about ripe, and we danced to the Violent Femmes in the base lodge. This time, daddy and I both started to get sick, and we never left — but your Grammy bundled you up and took you on a tour of the base village.

You still aren’t crawling, but you’re moving…. you sit on your bottom and use your heels and knees to pivot around, and now you can pinwheel around the floor to get from one place to another. You can also scoot backwards on your belly, but you don’t really like that, because you REALLY want to be moving TOWARDS something, and your movements just end up putting you farther away. But, while learning about that, you also learned how to get yourself up into a sitting position.

In fact, your daycare teachers saw that move yesterday, 4/18, and wrote it on your daily report, along with the time: 2:52 pm, because they were so excited. They couldn’t wait for me to read it, and couldn’t wait to share, and when I read it, I said "oh, yeah, she did that last night." In retrospect, I feel kind of bad. While one of the cons of being a working mama is that I’m likely to miss some firsts, I think that your teachers might be excited to see your firsts, too. They take such good care of you, and genuinely adore you. (In fact, I’ll probably laugh about this one day, but my main concern these days about daycare is that I worry that they love you too MUCH, which is right on par with my worry that you had some dread disease that had Excessive Smiling as a symptom…)

You are feeding yourself, mostly, these days. You love frozen blueberries, and your veggie puffs, and the new one is cheese… when I pull cheese from the fridge, you start kicking your legs and breathing fast, and the cat magically appears next to your highchair. You also like peas, gardenburger, peaches and pears, pancakes, crackers, and yogurt.

Today was the first beautiful spring day of the season. Yes, it was pretty late, but it was worth it. When Daddy came home, we pulled out your stroller (it’d been months since it’d been used!) and we did our standard neighborhood route. You were comfy in your stroller, and we saw a few neighbors. It was just so nice to be smelling the fresh air, spotting a flower blooming in the yard, and walking with you, so much bigger than your first walk, almost a year ago.  And next month, you’ll be ONE. I don’t know how that happened.

I Love you Ingrid!

Love, Mama