Happy Mother’s Day*

Good morning, lovelies.

If you’re a mom, I hope you’re getting pampered and loved by your children and spouses/baby daddies.  If not, you should go pamper yourself anyway!  If you’re a dude … well, buy yourself some chocolates and watch some soap opera reruns.  You deserve to be a woman for a day.

All of my Mother’s Day stuff was done early, so today is going to be pretty uneventful.  I’m okay with that. 

It’s absolutely gorgeous outside, so I’m thinking about taking a family trip to the dog park.  We’ve been watching Mandi’s cat this weekend and she is terrorizing Sprocket.  He had such a good time at the park yesterday – sans cat!.  He’s so much fun to watch when he plays with the other dogs.  And everyone loves him because he’s so cute.

In other news, my Mother’s Day gift from Duckie was a new tattoo.  I’ve been thinking about a new tattoo since shortly after Lily was born.  It took a long while to pick a design and a tattoo parlor, but I finally did it.  So, I had my tattoo done on Thursday night.  The tattoo artist, Seneca, improved on the reference picture that I brought him and he was pretty damn good looking, so all in all, it was a great experience.  Minus the pain.  Their website says that a tattoo hurts about like a bee sting.  They don’t mention that it hurts like a bee sting…if you’re stung by an entire colony of Africanized Killer Bees.  I don’t remember my last tattoo hurting this much.  Then again, I was 18 at the time.  Time tends to make the memory of pain kind of go away.  Except child birth pain.  I remember that vividly.  Still no more kids for me.

It’s not the best pic, but I took it with the galaxy after I got home, so it’ll do.

I am in love with this thing.

So, my baby recently turned one.  I’m working on a photobook for her first year.  It’s kind of hard.  I’m trying to make sure I get all of the important info in there  (milestones, birth stats, etc ) but also some of our own thoughts and feelings (how being pregnant with her felt, what we felt like when we first found out, what it was like right after she was born, how we feel about the world right now, etc) AND some info about the year she was born (top headlines, top songs, movies, etc).  I’ve got 5 pages to go and I have no idea what to fill them up with.  Well, one will be her first birthday, obviously.  Another will be some of the pics we had done by a professional photographer last weekend…so that leaves 3 pages.  I’ll figure it out, I’m sure.  If you have any suggestions, though, I’m open to them.

I never thought that I would ever be a mom.  For the majority of my adult life, I didn’t want kids.  Then I got help for my anxiety and for the abuse in my past.  And I changed my mind.  And now I have Lily.  It’s a different kind of love.  The kind of love that makes your eyes water and your heart swell when they learn something new.  The kind of love that makes you want to rip the heart out of every child abuser-killer-molester you read about in the news.  The kind of love that makes you fight hard to keep from locking your baby up in your house with you so you can protect her from all the dangers in the world (which, really, is just ridiculous, right?…right?).  The kind of love that only you and (hopefully) your child’s father will ever feel for that particular little person.  And the kind of love that no sane person would ever take away from her, no matter what she does.  I love her so much it hurts sometimes.  And there I was, when I was pregnant, wondering if I would love her.  Kind of ridiculous now that I think about it.  How could I not love this trouble maker?

And, to end this entry, my baby when she was born and when she turned one. 

My god, she has grown so much.  It’s hard to believe that the little, totally dependent, floppy poop machine I gave birth to could have grown into a walking, (somewhat) talking toddler with a seriously fierce independent streak.  I am so proud of her and everything that’s she’s accomplished in this past year.  I know, all babies learn this stuff … but it’s new to me and I think it’s amazing.