Dear Reese,
I have already become the parent who eats her kid’s candy, sorry darling. We come home today with a bag of Valentines from your class: you get new bath toys, snacks and purees, and two containers of bubbles. I’m going to need other parents to chill out. One kid just gives you a simple Valentine’s card, no extras. That is the standard we should hold ourselves to.
Among the Valentines is, appropriately, a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup molder into a heart. I spend one second googling “Can an 8-month-old eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup” and accept the first answer I see (“no, too much sugar”) before eating it myself in the middle of the workday.
Later, I don’t google if you can eat a fruit strip or not but probably not so I eat that as an an after-dinner snack while you play with your new plastic crab (I am not sure how crab toys became Valentine’s gifts, but here we are).
You are 8 months old, today. I remember to take your picture in the morning and we barely get a half smile in before you’re rolling over and playing with the felt circle I try to keep on the “8”. You are wiggly in everything you do these days.
It’s hard to believe 8 months have passed since you were born. Your cousin Kai turns one in a couple of days and soon enough that will be you. You seem more grown up to me every day — more opinioned too, though I think you came out that way.
Tonight, your opinion is that you'd like to be held, thank you very much. You must have had enough exercise at daycare because you don’t tolerate playing on the floor for very long while I make us dinner and you have tears on your face, poor girl, while you wait for me to wash your bottles. So I hold you on my hip while I test that the noodles are cooked.
You do seem to like mac & cheese — you might even have swallowed a few pieces while we eat, though most of it still ends up in your bib or on the floor along with three out of three raspberries. When I offer you some sweet carrot puree, you refuse. It’s my fault: if we were going to have a vegetable, we should have had it first, not as dessert.
Love,
Mama