Dear Miles,

Last night your dad and I were doing a little math, and we realized that with your 16 months on the outside and my 8 months of pregnancy, you’ve been in our lives one way or another for two entire years.  It’s funny how fast it’s gone in some ways and how slowly it’s gone in others.  It feels like my life before you was just some kind of dream—recognizable, but surreal.  And well-rested.

Because it seems like I always post an update on your sleep habits, here’s this month’s:  overall, you’re doing pretty well.  You have a molar coming in that’s been causing trouble, but you’ve done a good job lately staying in your crib for longer.  You do inevitably end up in our bed, which is mostly fine.  I don’t sleep all that well when you’re in your crib anyway, because I keep going to check on you.  The only problem is you like to make funny shapes between your dad and me, like the cross-bar of an H or the diagonal of an N.  The N has been more popular lately, which means my head often ends up halfway on the bedside table, and your dad risks kicks to the sibling-makers.

I guess it’s your way of ensuring your place of honor in the family.  Never you fear—you won’t have a sibling any time soon.  Two in diapers at the same time is a scary thought, and I need to bank up some more sleep first.

You are getting much more independent, though.  Last night we went out for a walk on the multi-purpose trail behind our house, and you walked a good part of the distance yourself.  It was, as your dad noted, a Family Circus-esque kind of route, with lots of doubling back and stops to look at plants and dirt piles and wildlife and airplanes in the sky, but it gave me a glimpse into the future when you’ll be walking by yourself all the time.

You can climb up into chairs by yourself and reasonably reliably get down.  Actually, you want to climb up just about anything that can be climbed, including the play equipment at the park and various household items.  You can eat with a spoon, as long as you don’t have to be too tidy about it.  You can drink from a cup by holding it with both hands, and as it turns out, the key to getting milk into you is to make it of the chocolate variety.

It makes me shudder a little to think that we’re giving you chocolate milk every day, but at your last checkup, you had dropped a standard deviation in weight and skipped up a little in height, which puts you at 25th percentile for weight and a little over 50th for height.  The doctor wasn’t too concerned, as long as your weight doesn’t go down another level, but it’s something we’re keeping an eye on.  Regardless, the advantages of chocolate milk seem to beat the disadvantages right now, since we’re not too concerned about you being overweight.

(Don’t tell your dad this, but with his genes in you, I think you may be fated to skinniness.  This is not so bad as long as you remember to wear belts.)

You play so many fun games nowadays.  You love to play with your magnets and stacking rings and Legos, and you seem to have really figured out how mirrors work.  No longer is that baby in the mirror a perplexing stranger; now, when we plunk a silly hat on your head, you run squealing to the mirror to check out how you look.

As usual, you charmed a variety of friends and family, including your regular fan clubs of Mubby/Skittergramps and Grandma Cheryl/Grandpa Denny.  You also spent some time with Grammy and Pop-Pop and our friend Danny.

You had your first significant fever this month, which was scary in these days of Swine Flu hysteria.  [Note for posterity:  in the spring of 2009, a Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico and the U.S. had everyone freaked out.]  It turned out to be nothing serious, maybe related to teething and maybe not, but you were a miserable little guy for 24 hours or so.  You didn’t even want to play outside, which is really unusual for you.  Ordinarily we have to watch you carefully, because you might put a fist through the screen door in an attempt to get outdoors.

A week from today, you’ll get to see a whole new landscape.  It will be your second time seeing the ocean, but your first time in a climate where it’s hospitable for swimming.  We’ll talk more about that in next month’s update after we’ve returned, but in the meantime, I’m pretty excited for you to use your passport for the first time.  Let’s hope you do as well on the airplanes this time as you did last.

I think my favorite of your developments of this month is the sharp upswing in your cuddliness.  You’ve started giving snuggles and hugs in the strangest and most delightful ways.  For example, you love to approach someone who is sitting on a toilet (yes, we have an open-bathroom-door kind of household these days) and put your cold hands on his/her thigh to elicit a shriek.  Then, as if in apology, you lean down and snuggle the thigh with your cheek.  You also like to cuddle people’s feet.

Now that I write this down, it kind of sounds like you’ve got some weird preferences emerging.  Hm.  Ah well, there are worse things.  I’m glad to report that you also snuggle shoulders and tummies.  Your kisses are just the kind I’d normally hate—spitty and lingering and suctiony—but coming from you, they are perfect.

I love you, Scoop.

Mommy