Lucas Camilo

This past weekend we celebrated Ida’s first birthday, and our first year of being a family of four.   It’s hard to overstate how amazing any first year of life is, and Ida’s is certainly no exception. She’s gone from a totally helpless infant to having lots of personality and skill in getting what she wants out of the world. She smiles, rolls, grabs, turns pages, sits and plays, says “baaa” to balls, “boah” to dogs, “mamamamamama” with a loud cry at 5:45 am when its time to get up. She has the most amazing deep belly chuckle, that escalates to almost breathless writhing and kicking and when Burke is coming in for a tickle attack.

We first decided we didn’t want to throw a birthday party (too much work for a baby who doesn’t know the difference!), but that decision morphed into three days strait of wonderful, small celebrations. On Friday, her actual birthday, the four of us went out for pizza and beer to celebrate our family-versary. On Saturday we had a fun dance party with our extended family here in Seattle, including an amazing Xbox inspired dance party and Ida’s first experience of cake.

On Sunday we had a few close friends and their kids over for not-party number three, where we put party hats on cute toddlers and blew out another birthday candle. Our most special guests were Sha and Matt and their baby, Tighe. Tio Sha and Matt have been close to Lucas since he was born, so it was really exciting to introduce Lucas to their daughter and have them in town to celebrate both our growing families.

Ida loved it all. And as far as I can tell, Ida has loved just about every day on earth so far. She is an almost constantly content baby, either giggling, or saying “oooooh!!” at other babies or dogs, making fun faces as she smears food everywhere, or asking to be picked up and held. So I’m not sure if her birthday weekend felt any more special than any other day.

Everyone asks us “How’s Ida?” And we often just say this: She’s so happy. We couldn’t have ordered up an easier baby. (Did we mention that she’s gone from waking up almost every hour of the night to sometimes sleeping 11 hours straight?)

The other question that sometimes people are asking is “how is her body doing?” Or maybe they mean, “how are you, her parents, doing with her physical delays?” She’s so clearly different than your average baby by now. She’s one year old and she’s not able to crawl yet, much less stand on her own or walk. And the short answer is, we’re doing great. We’ve got a brilliant six year old showing us how to live joyfully with limitations. We have a happy baby who is figuring out how to move around.  Recently she’s become quite confident at moving around the room by sliding out on her belly from sitting; then rolling across the room; then pushing, pulling, and heaving herself back up to sitting. She usually goes for a bookshelf or shoe corner or backpack that she can quickly dump out and then inspect the contents.

And the more complex answer is that of course we worry. We hope that she’ll feel confident about living a full life, whether her disability ends up feeling major or minor to her. We wish that we didn’t have to add to our calendars the long list of appointments that come with motor delays. We wish she could keep up with her peers who are running around the room now. And we’re OK with all that, too. Lucas has taught us so much, including the fact that you can both wish things were easier and love exactly the kid you have in front of you. And that’s what we did this weekend. We loved up Ida exactly as she is. Brilliant and funny and moving in her own way around the world.