Dear Ingrid,

Today you are 8 months old, and it was our last weekday at home, just you and me, before you start daycare on Monday. It snowed, and we picked up Grandma and Grandpa from the airport, both of them way more interested in seeing you than me, or their car, or anything else. In fact, I had to tell you grandpa to "please, turn around and sit in your seat!" because he was so excited to see you after a 2 week hiatus.

I cannot believe how quickly you change, and yet how much of that tiny baby I held in my arms for the first time, 8 months ago, can be seen in you, still. You love to sit, have no interest in crawling, but you love to talk to us now. We’ve spent the last two weeks screeching in tune with each other, or having long conversations of "eh?" being volleyed back and forth.

You know what my glasses are, now, and in the mornings when we wake up, you get so excited to see me put them on.  I’ve even started letting you get my glasses. I fly you over to the nighstand, and you study all the temptations on it, and when I say "Get mama’s glasses!" you forgo the remote, the receipts, the post-it pad, the lotion tube and the pill bottle, and reach out your fingers like a little restaurant-lobby-claw game, plucking my glasses from the pile and then, of course, trying to eat them.

You have a favorite book, it seems. "Where is baby’s bellybutton?" is the first one you seem to recognize as having a value beyond "delicious," and you have quickly learned how to pull back the flaps. I left the room for a few minutes the other day (easy to do when you don’t crawl yet!) and came back to find that you’d found the book amongst your toys, opened it on your lap rightside up (granted, that was probably a fluke), and looking at the faces and talking to the babies on the pages. "Eh! Eh! EEEEEEpffffff Eh?" 

In this month, you celebrated your first Christmas, and your first New Year. There was lots of happiness: aunt kate was so happy to see you, and you’d grown so much! And you saw all of your cousins on your dad’s side on Christmas Eve, and Grandma and Grandpa were with us for Christmas day. There was sadness too, with our cousin Colson’s death, and the funeral that followed. And in between those events, you were sick, and had your first ER visit (luckily, just a fever).  In sad times, though, you managed to bring smiles to so many faces.

You start daycare on Monday, for-real daycare this time, not like the campus daycare situation. Your caregivers seem kind and smart and caring, and the building and grounds are beautiful. I hope that I find a job that offers some flexibility, because I will miss our storytimes and massage class. I will especially miss lazy mornings, with you getting a nurse-up in the big bed before we start the day, and after Daddy has left.  Those quiet moments are the ones that I carry with me at all times, the ones I hope to never forget, the ones that make me content to be Ingrid’s Mama. In those moments, my degrees don’t matter, my looks, my income, my weight — in those moments I am exactly the person I’ve always wanted to be, with the person I always wanted to be with, I just didn’t know it yet.

I love you, Ingrid.

Love, Mama