Well, we managed to keep a baby alive for a whole year. Go us!

Maya – ONE YEAR OLD!

Maya is one year old today. We made it through sleepless nights, DOC band wearing, a few bouts of sickness, and airline travel with an infant (twice). Through work-life balance issues and endless breast milk pumping. Through baby vomit and baby blood. And now our kid is a healthy, happy one year old.

Even through all that, I still can’t figure out where the time has gone. I had no idea how much pure joy there was in parenthood. I’ve heard countless new parents gush, even those not known to be overly expressive, but there’s really no understanding it till you’re in their shoes. The sleepless nights, the shitty diapers, the anxiety over which decisions are “right” … all completely worth it.

Of course, Maya can’t walk or talk yet. Maybe all that will change ;-)

Making Grammy nervous

We had planned to start her at daycare this week. After taking her there to visit last week, we realized that we just weren’t ready for her to be out of the house and away from us all day. Anna agreed to continue being Maya’s nanny for a while longer. We agreed with each other to reassess in another six months. We still feel like it’s important to get her around other little kids, but there’s time for that later. In the mean time, we’re really enjoying having her around.

Grandpa builds the towers, Maya knocks ’em down

We had her party this past Saturday. Both sets of grandparents made it down and her Aunt Darci and cousin AP visited as well. A decent number of our friends showed up too. I think there were maybe 15-20 people in the house all told, setting a new record for number of guests we’ve entertained at one time. I baked cookies and birthday cake. Sean and Harry and Helen picked up our barbecue, sides, and pie order from Micklethwait Craft Meats (a wholly satisfactory choice by the way). Dad and Carol made sure the dishes were washed and Maya stayed out of trouble. There was a cooler full of drinks and a pile of presents.

Face full of barbecue

Because of all the commotion with family being in town, Maya was resistant to napping; she wanted to be part of the action. She finally settled down about a half hour before her party was to start. We decided a happy baby was better than a punctual baby, so she slept through the first half hour of her party. Already, she’s learning how to be fashionably late.

Cake!

Little girl loves her some barbecue. Lolli and Pop were feeding her, and it sounds like she attacked her plate of food. I expect she was already plenty full by the time we brought in her cake. Just like her Daddy though, she found room for dessert and took out a substantial chunk of birthday cake.

Opening presents

A quick bath helped knock off the icing and seemed to perk Maya up a bit. She found the energy to let Aunt Darci and AP help her open her presents. Everyone was very generous and Maya had quite the haul of clothing and toys.

Hellooooooo Pop

Sunday was a quiet day, spent examining presents and spending time with Grammy and Grandpa and Lolli and Pop before they all started the arduous drive back home. By the end of their visit, Maya had even warmed up enough to dole out kisses to everyone.

Relaxing with Lolli

We are deeming the birthday weekend a success. The party seemed to go well, and despite all the hustle and bustle, we still got to spend a decent amount of time with our parents. And probably more importantly Maya got some time with her grandparents.

Sean wanted to take smash cake photos with Maya. I naively thought that meant he wanted me to let her smash into her cake on her birthday and have him take photos. Then he started showing me some example images with beautiful backgrounds and adorably clad babies and ridiculously large cakes. Clearly, this would require a little more effort.

Maya’s cake smash – almost 1 year old

To start with, I bought a giant cupcake pan. Then, because so many of the cakes in the photos looked to be professionally done, I bought a decorating kit. Sean bought a purple background and a fluffy orange tutu. I baked a test cake and practiced decorating it. I made a giant pile of icing. I attempted to refrigerate said icing overnight and somehow destroyed it. Sean purchased emergency icing (‘cause I just didn’t feel like making more icing just then.) The long and short is that a LOT of preparation went into this project.

The day finally came for the photos. I had baked the cake earlier in the day and decorated it while Maya napped. Sean set up his background and lighting. I looked at his set-up and told him he needed to be fast on the trigger. If the pudding painting was any indicator, the girl was going to be hauling cake to her mouth as fast as her little arms could manage. He said he wasn’t so sure. Lots of the kids in the online photos were pretty dainty about it. Maya, generally speaking, is not a dainty child. I bet him five dollars that she’d tear into it. Needless to say, I lost my money.

Happy Pre-smash Maya

We got her all tutu-ed up and brought her in for some photos. She happily bounced around and grinned while Sean took a few cake-free shots. Then I brought the cake in. She reached out and touched it right away, and then she paused. She looked around in confusion and crawled around the cake to get to me. We tried it again. Nope, getting away from the cake as quickly as possible.

We thought maybe it was because it was late in the day, so we tried again the next day. Again, no joy. She’d scramble away from that cake and into my arms almost as soon as I sat her down. I gave her tastes of the icing and of the cake, feeling certain that if she just realized it was sweet and delicious, she’d lay into it, and still, she was having none of it. She got so upset at one point, she was full on, tears-streaming-down-her-face crying. Even sitting on my lap near the cake, she was very tentative and kept wanting to crawl away.

Not sure about this …

Finally, Daddy took control of the situation. He plopped her in front of the cake and shoved her hands in it. Even then, she was pretty ambivalent about the situation, seeming to want nothing more than to get that mess off her hands. We did manage to get some cute smash cake photos, they just weren’t the photos we set out to capture. When Maya was born a month early, someone told us it was good practice – that she’d be surprising us every step of the way. That person wasn’t wrong.