Countdown to Baby Harrison!: Our girl is one

Mairi is one!

Mairi celebrating her first birthday with some chocolate cake in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia

She celebrated her first birthday with her mom and dad and grandma and grandpa Wartman in Nova Scotia. We woke up on the ferry after not a very good sleep and drove to Tatamagouche. We stayed at a bed and breakfast and had a trying supper out at the Chowder House. Mairi was not in a very celebratory mood so we ended up taking turns walking with her outside the restaurant. After supper we went for a nice stroll down to the water. The warm sun was shining and it was a beautiful moment. Then we went back to the B&B, opened some more presents, stripped her down to her diaper and shared some chocolate cake. We had two more amazing birthday celebrations when we got home: her Auntie Heather and Uncle Chris had everyone over the Saturday after we got back. The house was amazingly decorated with streamers and balloons and signs (with help from Auntie Jocelyn and Uncle Michael) and Auntie Jessie even baked Mairi her own awesome cake, which she destroyed and ate on a plastic sheet on the ground! She was so spoiled by all her friends and aunties and uncles. Thank you again you guys - it was so absolutely amazing!!! The next night we had all the family over for pizza and lasagna and I made a wacky cake decorated with pink icing. Mairi got a big slice of it but she had to share this time! And boy did she get spoiled with presents all over again! This is one loved baby!!!

This post has been a long time coming. And yes, we've been away and have been busy with trying to squeeze lots of activity into the last few nice days of summer, but maybe I also have mixed feelings about my baby turning into a toddler. It went by so quickly. My tiny, squirmy little baby is now a rambunctious, funny, toddler with a mind all her own. In some ways I wish I could just hit the rewind button and go back to relive the last year again. We'll never have that amount of time to just be together again. It's hard to let go of that.

Part of what's making the transition hard is that I don't really have a set plan on what I'm going to do. I was planning on staying home with Mairi. Then it was decided that I need to bring in some income, so I was going to see if working from home would work. Then I applied for a job that looked interesting. There is no set direction and I kind of feel like I'm in limbo between being a mom and working. I want to stay home, but I'm really not sure how to go about starting a business. I just wish we didn't have to worry about it and I could just be a stay at home mom for a while, but that's not the reality. So I'll have to figure something out. Just don't know what it's going to look like right now.

But back to the star of the show: Mairi! The rest of the summer was fun but busy. She and I spent some time at the lake. Mairi is such a beach bum and water baby! We took her to her first Folk Festival and she really enjoyed grooving to the music. In fact, we find she really feels music of all kinds, and starts to dance almost as soon as she hears it. She is also starting to be a little entertainer: if she does something and it gets a laugh she will do it over and over again. Jeff has taught her "what a puppy says": she will respond with "ruff, ruff!" I taught her how to do a puffin impression where she flaps her arms up and down really fast. She is just such a chariming kid. She smiles and says hi to almost everyone she encounters. She really charmed all the WestJet flight crews on our trip out east.

She was a great flyer this time. We had layovers in Toronto going to and from the east coast and that made a big difference. She was fairly good on the trip but getting Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease meant she was not a great sleeper, and got quite grumpy for suppers out. We had a very memorable night on a ferry headed for Nova Scotia the night before her birthday. None of us got much sleep but she sure had a nice time dancing to the guitar player providing entertainment. He was so charmed and distracted by her smiling and dancing that he had to stop mid-song!

Mairi continues to take a few steps at a time, but is not yet off and walking. She is very close though - hardly hanging on at all. She is great at going up stairs and wants to do it all day and night. She is now getting pretty good at going down backwards too. Mairi is able to feed herself with a fork and spoon now - though it's quite messy and time-consuming. She is eating everything now and drinking milk. She says quite a few words well now: hi, bye-bye, baby, puppy, button, dada, mama, uh-oh, and her favourite phrase "what's that?" She's getting really good at sorting shape toys too.

Her sleeping is good when she's at home or at least in her own room - about 10-11 hours straight. But when she is in the same room with us it's not good. Makes for tiring travel. Generally though, she is a pretty good girl. She had many, many checkups last week because she turned a year and she is about 20 lbs now. She is on the same trajectory at the doctors: 75th percentile for height and head, just below 50th percentile for her weight. She is very healthy and has even finally been discharged from physiotherapy! Yay!

Well posting will be a bit less frequent now. I really wanted to document every month for the first year and I've done that. But finding the time to keep this up is tricky. Hope you have enjoyed this journey from 12 weeks pregnant to one year old girl!