Grace and Hazel

Dear Grace,

Tomorrow you turn 1 year old. Your mom and I were just in the garage at our house on Greenwich Street (in San Francisco) getting all the supplies ready for your party. I had to wear sunglasses to keep my eyes from pink burns. While were were down there, I turned your carseat around to face forward. Personally, I would have waited until you were 21 to do that, but you are so long that you have been kicking the back seat for a long time now. We call you long, because you aren’t standing up yet. When you can do that, we will start calling you “tall”. Which ever direction you measure, you are a big girl relative to your beginnings. At 24 lbs, you are bigger than most little 1 year-olds and that makes us so happy. You are 8 times bigger than the skinny little thing that we met 365 days ago and we could not be more proud of you. For the first year of your life, we had a nickname for you that I will not write beyond FB and we have promised not to use anymore. It was a nickname of complete affection and pride, but it would not make you very happy if you heard it yelled across the schoolyard in a few years, so we will stop. We will probably go back to calling you “garbanzo bean” and “chickpea” because we like the way they sound and we like hummus.

You started crawling a month or two ago (you can check the videos for the actual date) and we love seeing how excited you get motoring from place to place. You have figured out how fun it is to get into stuff so I am keeping up with you in terms of baby proofing the house. We have several gates to keep you contained and the cabinets and drawers are gradually being locked down. So far, you haven’t showed a lot of interest in standing and/or walking but we said the same thing about crawling and you caught on to that in a hurry. Your Grammie thinks you might just be a genius and she takes every opportunity to teach you something new. BONK! is your current favorite game and the rules are simple enough for me to follow. We look forward to many years of playing games with you.

It is hard to believe that it has been a whole year since you came barreling into our lives. At the time, everything was moving so fast that we could barely focus on getting through the next week, much less what a whole year with you would be like. Neither you mother nor I could have imagined how perfect you would be. Everyone that meets you comments on how beautiful and well mannered you are. We can only hope that lasts through at least your third birthday. We can already see a sense of humor in the way you laugh and play, especially with your best friend Bla Bla and whenever you see your dog/brother Lincoln.

I hesitate to tell you how good you are because your mother will think that I am jinxing our next few years but I can’t really help myself. You have been sleeping through the night…almost every night for the last 11 months. It is almost embarrassing to tell other parents that, so we don’t talk about it much. You also don’t seem to care who is holding you and you find something entertaining in just about everyone. We have yet to leave you with someone and have you complain (much).

Complaints may be forthcoming, though, as you are just starting to figure out some words. We think you know what you are saying with “ma ma” and “da da”. “Ba ba” might mean you are hungry or starved for the company of your owl-faced doll. You for sure have figured out “more”, I think your “ma ma” may have taught you that one.

Tomorrow you will wake up like any other day but things will change quickly as we whisk you away for a pink-themed picnic attended by 50 or 60 of your closest friends and admirers. After knowing you for only one year, I am pretty sure there will be many, many more.

We love you and look forward to another wonderful year.

Love, Mom and Dad.

Open mouth, insert foot.

When we look at Grace (and we try to do that everyday) we don’t really see a preemie anymore, she hit the 75th percentile for her chronological age a while ago and never looked back. Apart from her complete lack of any teeth, she seems like any other nearly 1 year-old, except way cuter. However, because she took a 10 week shortcut in her birthing process, we are “invited” to be “followed” by a number of “specialists” (that last one probably didn’t need quotes but it felt right). Even though she seems normal to us, we feel that a team of experts checking her out, can’t be a bad thing. There is always a chance that they will discover something amazing that we missed. “Wow, how long has she been doing long division?”. Plus, insurance seems to cover it and it is a lot easier than reading books on child development.

Last week we went to a place called the Whitney Clinic, which follows preemie cases at regular intervals. Like the NICU, we are mostly embarrassed in the face of other parents of preemies because she is generally a giant by comparison and has few horror stories to date. Of the four specialists—a neurologist, a social worker, a registered nurse and a behavioral psychologist—the behaviorist, Jan, was the most fun and the most informative. She sat down across the table from Grace, who sat perched on Jenn’s lap wondering who this lady was and what was in her toy box.

Jan began by asking Grace if she wanted to play “Patty Cake”. Neither Jenn nor I have played this with her so we expected about the same reaction one might get from asking Lincoln to play chess. Without missing a beat, Grace clapped her hands. “Oh,” says Jan, “that’s good.” Good?! That was genius! After a few other things like rolling red cubes on the table (I suggested she would get a better reaction if she said “New shooter coming out!”) Jan asked if Grace reacted to her name. Having never really considered it, I said “Hey, Grace”. She whipped her head around so fast, I thought she was going to say “Dad, I’m busy shooting craps!” We reveled in the rest of our time with Jan, as she tried out the rest of her bag of tricks and used the word “perfect” just enough times for decorum to require us to agree. Who are we to disagree with a “specialist”?

Before there were adorable pictures in the rocking chair that Grammie gave her, Grace had her innocent fun times…

and times when the rocking was just not the fun it was supposed to be…

she never let go of her love of the rocking chair, though. (Thanks Grammie!)

Let the good times roll.

Sitting up is so easy, Grace can now do it in her sleep!  At some point between waking up, sitting up and screaming to the nearest attendant, Grace realized that she wasn’t quite done sleeping and took a little post-nap snooze.  Hopefully, she can manage to stay awake while crawling or we are going to have to invest in some bandaids and icepacks.