Life With Canaan 12 Months In

It is so surreal to me that I have a one YEAR old. In every sense, he still is and always will be my baby. But watching him turn into a little boy, a little kid, is amazing, exciting, and heartbreaking at the same time. Let’s dive right in and chat about the last couple months. This is Life With Canaan, 12 Months In. 

I was going to write a whole post called “How to Travel With a Baby” but I didn’t want to come across as trying to sound like some kind of expert, because every time you fly as your baby gets a little older, it is a different experience. Canaan has been on 11 flights. ELEVEN. All with me, mostly just the two of us, only a handful with my husband or my parents there to help me. Let me tell you, you have to be on you’re A Game or it can all just crumble.

BUT I’ll just keep it at: I am so lucky he is a great traveler. He is totally aware that something big is happening and he tries so hard to be on his best behavior. He is happy, smiley, and generally pretty quiet. He has gotten past the stage where he is guaranteed to sleep through the flight, so I just hold my breath and see what I get after takeoff. Sometimes he wants to bounce on my lap and play the whole time and sometimes he sleeps for half the flight then makes faces at whoever is sitting behind us for the rest of it. All good.

At the beginning of December we moved! We packed up and moved to the northern Chicago suburbs. We are currently staying with my parents until we find a place of our own. Honestly, the help and the break has been a godsend. My mom holds him and plays with him all day on the days she is home and I get to run to Starbucks alone. It’s amazing.

The night before we left our home Canaan took his first steps. It made me bawl like a baby to see him shuffle along in the house where we first brought him home. It was so right.

Now, he loves to let go of the coffee table, take a few shaky steps into someone’s arms and burst into laughter. He is so impressed with himself!

Canaan has also become best friends with my parents’ dog, Darla. We have two dogs of our own that are seriously unimpressed by his presence (“when does the man cub go back to the hospital?”) but my parents’ dog is C’s new sidekick. He feeds her half her food (I find this infuriating but can’t do much to stop it), grabs her face, closes his eyes and waits for her kisses… it’s really adorable.

He is a huge talker and lately he’s been obsessed with “hi” and saying it over and over. If you say it back to him, he’ll go round and round and round…I love it because he sounds like a little southern boy when he says it in his high-pitched voice. “Hiiiiiiyyyyyyy”

For his birthday we kept things pretty small. We had just moved, I had only jumped back into Stroller Strides workouts that week, and we only have my parents and my brother and his girlfriend. So I made him his special Applesauce Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting, whipped up a giant pitcher of hot chocolate and turned out a batch of marshmallows, decorated the house with homemade banners and we sang our hearts out. It was everything I wanted. I made everything, he loved it and everyone had such a great time.

Because his birthday is so close to Christmas, we kept gifts to a minimum. My husband and I got him a set of blocks from Little Sapling Toys which I just adore. My mom got him this cute magnet crane from Ikea, my brother got him a Melissa & Doug bead toy and there were a handful of other natural, fun toys for him. He was over the moon. He is just so excited and happy to have anyone watching him and playing with him, that his happiness level skyrockets when there are new toys involved.

 

To keep him social and keep me sane, we jumped into the local Stroller Strides workouts the second we moved up here. I can’t say enough good things about these groups. The workouts are always intense and sweaty and the babies have so much fun being run around in the strollers and being sung to. It’s a win-win for sure.

Food? Yes please! He loves fruit. Bananas and peanut butter, blueberries, cutie oranges…all of it. He is starting to eat more protein (turkey, salmon, beef in the chili we make) and starting to drink less and less milk. We nurse still for all of his milk and I am going to be sad to see it end. Yes, I do need a break and to have my body back for a little while, but I know I’m going to be so sad to not have those peaceful moments with my baby anymore. Any anger from the day or from his behavior melts away the second we are cuddled up together and he’s just my little baby for a moment. I’m going to be a wreck when it’s over. Oh, and yes, we nurse to sleep. So sue me.

And that wraps up our first year! I swear that whole year was just a blur. I’m so glad I started making photo books for him monthly for the first year, because looking back at them helps make the blur a little more clear. I don’t think I can keep up with the photo books as often (let’s be honest, I’m two months behind in making them and it makes me want to pull my hair out) but I’ll definitely try to keep photos organized in some way.

Mommy update: I’m still a mess. I DON’T have it all together, so please don’t think that. I write my blog and do SO much work for it, we go to Stroller Strides workouts, I’m potentially going to train to be a fitness instructor for them…but my back aches, my hair looks awful and it takes me two weeks to get around to painting my nails. I’ve had my hair cut once this year and colored NONE so I definitely have some epic regrowth. I’ve only just started doing my makeup in full again and it feels awesome to look at my face in the mirror and think I look halfway descent. My Starbucks consumption is at epic levels, no thanks to Starbucks for Life, and most days I remember to eat lunch by 2pm. Hooray! AND for some reason, all of my pictures are now blurry and grainy, so total mom fail. 

Thanks for reading my rambles on my baby! I love you for caring.

PS If you subscribe to my email list, you were sent a reader survey. It’s a quick survey thrown together by myself so I can see what to focus on for 2017. Please take it! Pretty please. And if you’re not an email subscriber, please do so. You get email just when I put out new content and no SPAM ever ever.

If you missed an update, my previous Life With Canaan post is this one…then this one…