Another year...

Dear Short One,

Now that you are tucked in to bed, having managed during dinner to wrestle that bit of leftover birthday cake from my fingers (I thought you were only interested in the icing, honest) and cram it into your mouth along with the piece you were holding, I feel it safe to reflect a bit on the time we have spent together.

Your Daddy and I were perhaps not model parenting material - Dad wanted kids to pass on his "good values" (or something close to that - I don't remember exactly the words he used when we were dating), and I was scared to death of babies and tended to squint and pretend not to see them whenever our paths crossed in public. Clearly, we needed help. In the few years since your arrival, you have managed to raise us right, and we hope that we are now a credit to you as parents. (Certainly, I no longer have any fear of infants. Oy.)

We, in turn, have been happy to watch you grow and your little mind develop and become ever more devious month after month. Your attraction to the latest gadget with buttons (cell phone, Blackberry, computer, iPod, etc., etc.) was a revelation to us, especially that time you managed to call Daddy's business contact in Hong Kong on my cell phone in the middle of (their) night. Really, the time it took you to progress from crawling to walking to running seems terribly short in hindsight, and I noticed this weekend that you can pretty much reach everything on the dining room table now (given how quickly you climb onto the chairs) and a decent amount of stuff on the kitchen counters, so I guess we'll have to move all of the interesting things over to the fireplace mantel now. We are really looking forward to witnessing your creativity firsthand next year and enjoying your big personality.

We hope you had a great birthday. I, as evidenced by the photo above, really have no idea how to make a birthday cake, but I'm glad you appreciated my effort, anyway. I'm sorry I had to pry the Big Bird, Elmo and Cookie Monster candles out of your hands, but you must admit that you did receive lots of nifty wrapping paper and a few puzzles and things afterwards, so I hope you will let bygones be bygones.

By the time you are old enough to read (and understand) this, I am sure I will no longer be allowed to kiss you in public, and many of the things I do will cause you excruciating embarrassment. So I figure there's nothing really to lose in saying here how much I love you and how glad I am that you are my baby boy.

Love,
Mama