:: nine months ::

Dear Lincoln: Today marks nine months of you being here, outside my body. I suppose most wouldn't consider that a huge milestone, but to me it is somehow. Because now you've been outside as long as you were inside, and when I think about how much you've learned in that time, my mind just boggles. I've been terrible when it comes to writing letters and tracking milestones. This one felt important, though, because this has been a really big month for you. So many firsts: you finally got teeth, and now have three. You finally started army crawling, then pulled yourself up, then started real crawling, and then started pulling yourself along furniture. You said your first real word: "hi" followed quickly by "dodgy" (doggie) and "dada." No sign yet of "mama." You got your first real haircut. Currently your favorite thing in the world is water. If it's wet, you want to splash in it. We've managed to hide the dog bowls from you, but as soon as we're at someone else's house, you make a beeline. Even a glass of water is fair game for splashing, as you stick your fat little fist into the glass and try to make the water jump out. You also love jumping in your jumpy frog thing. Now that you've figured out how your legs work, jumping is just the best thing ever. You will literally stay in that thing for an hour at a time, jumping and singing and sometimes just swinging. You sing and talk all the time now, babbling and chattering to yourself. I love to listen to you as I drive along, just making happy noises. There's more I could say, Lincoln, so much more, but I have to be up early tomorrow so I won't, except for this one thing: nobody told me it would be this much fun. I know parenting is hard work, and maybe in a year or two I'll look back on these days and think how naive I was, but right now, this year, all I know is that I love it, love this, love tucking you in at night and seeing your smiles when you wake up in the morning. I love your giggles when daddy tickles you, your poochy lip when you're mad at me, and the way you stuff toast into your mouth and eat everything in sight. I don't even remember being exhausted when you were little—I might have been, who knows—because right now, this? This is amazing. I love you, little man.