2 Years of Being in Love With You

Today is your birthday! Happy birthday baby boy! This year has seen you turn from a baby into a fully fledged terror toddler. I’m still impressed by the huge personality you were born with. You have always been your own person. You love so much, your heart is so big. Everything you love you put such passion into. You adore the neighbor girl who is also Hayley’s friend that if we even whisper her name you will start calling out for her and wanting to go and visit her through the fence. Planes, trains, fire trucks, school buses: they are all things you love with your whole being and you’re always excited to see them. You love story time before bed, you love to read books and see the pictures. It’s one of the funniest times of the day for me. Watching you learn and enjoy it. You and Hayley are little peas in a book-loving pod.


You are also so smart. You’re talking so much now and can repeat just about everything. I love when you say “I lub it!” and “Thank you much” it makes me giggle. Sometimes you are still rambling in toddler-ese and you get frustrated when we can’t understand you but usually you can get your point across.

Eating I think will always cause me to get more gray hair, but you are opening up sometimes. You ate rice with “stuff” in it last night and you do love pasta, and you would think your love of carbs would help fatten you up, but you are so skinny. You can wear the shorts that you were wearing last summer, of course now they aren’t long on you, but the fact that you are so skinny does worry me still. But I try adding cream and oil and butter to everything that I can get you to eat, but it’s still the amount of not eating. You are perfectly fine not eating any dinner and just drinking your bottle before bed. I know you’re probably suppose to be off the bottle by now, but it’s one of the only foods I know you’ll consume and the bottle is the best way to get it all in you. So until I don’t worry about your lack of nutrition, then you get the bottle, but we are cutting back in the morning and at nap time so we can get you to eat actual food.

You are decidedly too mobile. You are just steady enough to run around and only skin your knees up every few days, but face plants are not yet a thing of the past and you sport bruises all too often and I worry people will think I’m a bad mother, but I blame your father, it’s always on his watch that you get your owies.

You get to start “school” tomorrow. This is the last summer before Hayley starts kindergarten and while she’s still at the Eccles lab at SLCC I figure it would be fun to have you guys in there together and now that you are officially 2, you can start, so no more having to drop Hayley off and be sad you can’t stay and play with the kids, you will finally have your own class to go to and have fun. This really is the end of my little baby, we’re going to trust you to strangers 3 times a week. Luckily you have almost no separation anxiety. When we get to church on Sundays you are so excited to get to go to nursery that it’s a struggle to keep you entertained until it’s time to drop you off and if you do escape you want to go straight to nursery for and ask for “toys.”

It’s been a whirlwind year, it seems like only a few weeks ago you were a tiny baby and I was trying to get enough sleep to make it through the next day where I hoped to find time to shower, but now I’m still trying to find time to shower and if I can duct tape you down to keep you from running amuck. It’s been fun and I’m so excited to watch you grow, but I wish I could keep you little forever too. But I’ll take whatever I can get.

Love you,

Mama