Six months

Dear Little Man H,

I've been composing this letter to you in my head for weeks, but wouldn't you know it? I sit down to write it, and everything flies out of my head. Maybe there's something going on today...

Nah. That can't be it.

This past month has been the best so far. I realize I only have six of them to choose from in the running for The Best Month Ever, but seriously, I think that this one would win.

Last month you've discovered your feet with a flair that can only be described as gleeful. Now it's been a foot-fest (not to be confused with a foot fetish. That comes later, young man.) You can hold them! pull them! put them in your mouth! When sitting up, you can bend over and hit yourself in the head with them!

Okay, that last one you didn't enjoy so much. In fact, this whole Sitting Up thing, while kind of cool, ends in tears on a regular basis. In fact, it's pretty much guaranteed that after some absolutely fabulous arm-jerking and giggling and tag-wrangling and perhaps towel-waving, you will at one point want to look up, or sideways, or, gods forbid, BACKWARDS, at which time you will perilously begin to lose the battle with gravity. You do it slowly, oh-so-slowly, and often with a "What the FUCK?" look to me, until you pass the Point of No Return and gravity really does take hold and you weeble, you wobble, and you do indeed fall backwards. If I happened to be a caring mama at that point, you hit a boppy, but on a couple of occasions it must be said that we were overconfident and decided that we didn't need the big pillow. At those occasions, you hit the rug with a resounding thud. And after a couple seconds of shock, proceeded to let me know just how displeased you were.

Unless of course, you fall forwards, in which case you always hit with the thud-silence-scream combination. But that is happening more and more rarely.

You're starting to interact with your cousins, which is entertaining in the extreme; the Paci-pass you and your cousin Eleanor do is hilarious until one of you ends up with both paci's, somehow thinking that there is a way that if one paci is awesome, two must be AWESOMER. You do that, by the way, all the time. Paci? Awesome. Paci and fingers? AWESOMER. Nursing? awesome. Nursing AND sucking on my thumb? AWESOMER. Except it doesn't quite work that way. But whatever, we're working on it.

Speaking of nursing. You hit the big six months now, dude. You know what that means? FOOD. So far your dad and I are WAY more excited about this than you are. Not that you mind the attention, but so far, avocado and rice cereal get the tomato splat from you. Butternut squash doesn't suck, but you're still kind of meh on the whole thing.

Don't worry. I know that'll change--one day you'll be a teenage boy and I'll think back to when I couldn't get you to eat. You probably won't want to use utensils then either, but I bet you'll manage to swallow.

So today's kind of a big day here. It'll be interesting what today will be like seen ten years from now. Hopefully you'll grow up knowing a better world than you were born into. Hopefully one day you'll be in a history class and today, this date, this will be the beginning of a new chapter, like the Star Wars IV prologue but in a history book and therefore boring. Hopefully.

Hope.

If there's nothing else you deserve at six months of age, little man H, it's a big ol' barrel of hope. Well, that, and a pillow permanently behind you.

Love you,
Mama