Baby's First Birthday

            He smells like baby. They actually figured out a way to bottle that! He has learned how to open the round cardboard container of cheesy baby snacks by prying the plastic lid off with his bottom teeth like a bottle opener. Then he smells like cheese, little melt-away cheesy snacks made for few toothed chubby fingered babies.

            He slaps open palmed on the Kiddie Keys piano just his size. I show him how pressing a key with just one finger works too. He tries it, ponders that method, and goes back to his open palmed composition.

         

           He hands me a ball, I take it, he hands me another, I take it, and we do this until he has handed me all seven of the balls that the blue hippo carries on his back. I return them to him; one by one he refills the blue hippo. One ball misses and rolls off to the side with an uh-oh from me, and another in a different direction, uh-oh again. He watches me, interested in what will accompany my uh-oh. 

 

            He’s been here at Grandma’s house for two and a half hours and so far in this small window of time we have played piano, passed balls, eaten baby cheese snacks, baby fruit cookies, cereal, and juice. We have had a thirty minute walk outside listening to birds, watching butterflies, and chatting with Alexis and her dog Gizmo.  We admired flowers close-up and squished them, but only a little. We pulled leaves to carry along with us for a bit, and touched bare leafless stems, equally fascinating.

            He made faces, such funny I think I’ll try to cry but I really don’t need to faces, that I laughed out loud! His five and half toothed wide open mouth, and tightly scrunched eyes distorted his little face in the perfect pose to express serious unhappiness, but he knew he wasn’t actually unhappy and could not muster authenticity. He let out an “ahhh” that was unconvincing to us both. He liked that I laughed so he did it a half a dozen more times as the drama of the game intensified, with a grin between each go that he wouldn’t quite give permission to, but his eyes gave him away. This Grandma’s been around that block! He amused himself and found increased satisfaction that he could tickle Grandma’s funny bone too. 

            I wished I had my camera but I knew if I left the room to get it the moment would end. I didn’t want the moment to end. I had to accept that I, only I, would get to absorb the moment, just this once. It would not be forever captured in a picture. Very much like all of these 364 days since his delivery, it was a moment, that was all. Similar ones may occur but none exactly repeat. Even the magic of the camera cannot replay the moment. A photo is still and silent, an offering to the eyes of an image to spark the brain and jump-start the heart. Having been present, I could with a picture almost relive the moment, almost.

           

             He fusses with a dry empty diaper and a contented full tummy, so we walk. He rests his head down against my shoulder, I sing softly. When I stop he picks his head up and hums a few

notes of his own letting me know he prefers I continue. I sing Rock-a-bye Baby, Jesus Loves Me, Jesus Loves the Little Children, the B-I-B-L-E, This Little Light of Mine, and when I have just about depleted my children’s song list I resort to On Top of Old Smokey. He is heavy with slumber as the meat ball rolls out the door. A few bars more and I grin inside and out to think that my soft singing about a rolling meatball takes him that last step over the edge into baby dreamland.

            I lay him down on the couch, tuck him in with my zebra snuggie and go for the camera. There is something so perfectly pure and unblemished about a sleeping baby. I gaze with grandma eyes, click, smile, click click, smile. I click more than seventy photos of that sleeping beauty.

            My chair and I are six feet away from him asleep on the couch and I smell him still, he has rubbed off on me. His Mommy puts baby cologne on him, as if his already perfect little self really needed anything to be cuter, but I do like it. 

             Tomorrow he turns one year old. Tomorrow will be much like today for him and his parents. The days after that will be much like the days previous. Mornings will come, days will be mostly routine, night will wrap another one up, and the next one will come and repeat. New things will be added while some of the old things are dropped, having been edged out by the new. One by one the days will peel away exposing new skin, new shape, new size, new skills, new thoughts, and the baby will be left behind. The toddler will become. He will toddle to school and round the bases of childhood all the way to the home plate of adulthood, one day at a time, one moment at a time. And then just like that, the growing up game will have completed.

           

            So on this one day, for these few brief moments sweet baby boy, grandson of mine, when you awaken from your nap here on Grandma’s couch, I will relish your little scrunched up funny faces with furrowed brow and your chubby cheesy little pointing finger. I will breathe your baby-cologne’d self in and when that aroma mingles with cheesy melt-away baby snacks I will breathe you in still, until Mommy comes and takes you away. Then I will pray. I will pray that she and Daddy breathe you in. Breathe deeply in every furrowed brow, every hamming it up scrunched face, every pudgy dimpled pointing finger, every five and a half toothed gummy smile, as one by one, the birthdays add up, just like birthdays always do, and take you sweet baby, away.
 

            You have been cherished as a something-day-old and so-many-month-old baby. You will be cherished as a one year old. It’s your Birthday, but it is we who have been given the gift. Happy first Birthday sweetest gift ever, may we each strive to be worthy of such a treasure as you.