11 months

Dear Cole:

Today, you turn 11 months old, and I am both excited and sentimental. I am excited because your birthday is approaching, and I can’t wait to see you eat cake and tear through the wrapping paper on your presents and delight everyone with your smiles. But I am also sentimental because a month from now, you will no longer be considered a baby. You will be 1, and you will be a toddler (although I am pretty certain you will not be toddling yet by that time). This is your last non-birthday birthday, the last time we count your age in months instead of years. One, three or six months from now, we will tell people that you are 1, not 12, 14 or 17 months. The end of your babyhood is no longer a distant dot on the horizon. It is here, right in front of me. But, as I tell your brother, you will always be my baby.

This month had some good, bad and the ugly. Your biggest accomplishment this month is learning how to climb the stairs, and now you want to do nothing else but. You always have a huge grin on your face when you do it—it’s as if you simply can’t stop giggling. We started moving one of our armchairs in front of the stairs to block your way, yet you put such valiant effort in trying to either move the chair or try to squeeze your way through on the side of the chair. This morning, I saw you looking under the chair, assessing if you can fit your body under it and get through that way. We are working with you on teaching you how to get down safely, and you have not been particularly interested in paying attention because you only want to go up. But today, several times in a row you went both up and down, and gave yourself a huge round of applause once you got back to the bottom of the stairs, so perhaps we are turning the corner.

The bad/the ugly of this month has been your third ear infection in less than three months. You just finished the round of amoxicillin for ear infection #2, and a few days later, you got another cold with a runny nose. Several days later you started pulling on your ears, but otherwise you were acting fine, so we held out hope that perhaps it was related to teething. Well, one night, you woke up at midnight and then continued waking up crying every hour. You would only sleep in my arms—and even then, not for long. By 4 am, you began to run a fever, something that hasn’t happened since you were just a couple months old. Tylenol took the edge off, but you still weren’t yourself during the day. You slept much better the following night, but I decided to call the doctor nonetheless. At the appointment, we discovered that you had two ear infections, and one of them was so bad that it ruptured your ear drum. And this one exactly a week to the day since we last went to the doctor and got a clean bill of health from your previous infection. So now you are taking augmentin, an antibiotic that’s a step up from amoxicillin. The pediatrician said that if you get another infection soon after this one, we may have to go see an ENT. Ugh. Six days after you started taking this new medication, you broke out in what to me looked like hives, so I took you to the doctor again to rule out an allergic reaction to the drug. After consulting with several people in the office, they determined that it was not an allergy but a viral rash, probably associated with your cold. The antibiotic has also seemed to loosen your bowels, so you have the meanest, angriest diaper rash, and to hear you scream in pain when I change your diaper just breaks my heart. It is a different type of cry than any other—not angry, not frustrated, not upset—just so hurt. I feel a pit in my stomach just thinking about it. It will get better, my baby, it will get better soon. Of all the ointments I tried, Aquafor seems to be the one causing you the least pain, so we’ll stick with it for a while.

But despite being sick for a good portion of this month, you are still such a delightful baby. Your worst days, the days when you are sick, are still better than ‘average’ days of some other kids. You take it in stride, you smile, you do your usual things, you eat well—the only difference is perhaps that your patience is a little shorter than usual and you are little more likely to ask to be carried.

You love looking at books, flipping the pages for long periods of time. You are not as interested in being read to—you like to ‘read’ the books by yourself, on your own terms. You love playing ball, and you are really good at handling the ball—be it a big soccer ball or a small ball the size of your hand. You love to throw and kick, and we’ve spent as much as 15-20 minutes at a time rolling/throwing the ball to each other. You love playing peek-a-boo and showing us ‘so big.’ You pull yourself up on everything, but you haven’t really ‘cruised’ yet. You love standing against the glass door and looking outside. You created a new game where you reach toward me when your daddy is holding you, and as soon as he hands you to me, you start reaching back for him—and we keep going back and forth. You love splashing in the bath. You love pushing cars, big and small, on the floor and making engine sounds. Most of all, you love watching your brother, especially when he pays attention to you and plays with you.

You wave ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ most of the time. You use baby signs for ‘more’ and ‘all done,’ and I haven’t done a great job of introducing other signs to you. You still bounce to the music and clap your hands when you are happy. You started giving me big-mouth kisses after you finish nursing—quite possibly the best reward of this whole nursing experience for me.

Your eating habits have been interesting, to say the least. You are a great eater, it’s just that you like to trick us by switching your preferences constantly. About two months ago, you went through a stage where you were not at all interested in formula until we accidentally figured out that you wanted your bottles warmed up instead of room temperature—and then you started taking them again happily. Now you are back to being just fine with room temperature. Right around the time you turned 10 months, you decided that you were so over baby foods and refused to eat anything given to you with spoon. So we started giving you all finger foods, until about a week ago, you lost your interest in most of those and went back to being happy spoon-fed. So now we are doing a combination of the two, which, I guess, is quite normal for this age—but I just wish you wouldn’t change your mind so frequently. Next time, I expect a memo—a seven-day notice will suffice.

Cole, you continue to delight us daily. When I was telling Daddy about what a wonderful little boy you are, he said, “How did we ever live without him?”

Love you, my sweet,
Your mama