15 months

It’s been awhile. I know it’s not possible to accurately summarize the past four months in a single entry, so I’ll focus on the highlights and try to fill in the details later on.

Our boy is 15 months old today. He walks. He talks. He makes animal sounds and he makes us laugh. He loves to watch the birds in the feeder outside our front window. He often spots deer before we do. He loves cars. He REALLY loves cars. (Anything with wheels is a car.) He LOVES to be outside and he insists on going outside by yelling “HAAAA” and pointing at the door multiple times every day. He’s hungry all the time (a VERY welcome change). He still doesn’t eat dairy but he eats almost everything else, especially chicken. He regularly takes one nap a day (between 1 and 3 hours) and usually makes it through the night without us.

Side note: all around 1 year, Z started crawling (a crazy one knee, one foot shuffle), stopped breastfeeding, started sleeping through the night, dropped his second nap, and started talking. (I think his first word was “duck” but he picked up so many words soon after that it’s a little hard to say. The complete list in another post.)

Z’s baby cousin will be born any day now and I’m so excited to be an aunt.

And finally, we are home owners – of a three-bedroom house on an acre of land in Red Hook, NY, halfway between Albany and NYC.

We did our best to get settled quickly, to create a new routine for Z that feels normal and consistent, and I think we achieved that. He’s still Z – passionate and headstrong and emotional and yes, fussy or temperamental or whatever you want to call it. But he does seem happy here.

For our part, we miss Oakland every single day and I think it will be a long time before that wears off. I think of the Bay Area as the best time of my life – the place where I really became an adult, figured a few things out, made some wonderful friends, and had a hell of a lot of fun. Oddly enough, moving back here doesn’t feel like giving that all up. It feels like locking it away with all the other wonderful memories – camp, parts of high school, college – all great experiences that naturally must come to an end. And it feels like we are doing what we need to do to allow Zekey to begin his own wonderful memories, in a place where he has room to run, where we don’t have to lock the doors, where he can go to public school, where he can spend lots of time with his grandparents, and where he can escape from and come back to one day when the time feels right. And that’s what we have done. And I have no regrets.