One year

Linden is one year old! I am feeling very ambivalent. So excited for all of the things she can do, and the little person she is becoming. And also so sad to think that her tiny baby days are done and gone. Sometimes it is hard not to hang on to the past, even though of course it is impossible to hold on to what is already gone. But here are a few things about Linden right now:

She loves animals. Sometimes when she sees a dog out the window she is so excited that we can’t tell if she is ecstatic, terrified, desperate to get to the dog, or some other similarly strong emotion. I suspect it is a combination of all those. We sit on our window seat watching for dogs, squirrels, and birds, and Linden usually spots them before I do.

She is very expressive. Excitement, joy, and anger are her most common emotions.

She has started standing from the floor a lot. Whenever she is developing a new physical skill she practices over and over, through many failed attempts. She is very persistent.

She likes to figure out how things work. As an example, she has spent multiple sessions, maybe 10 minutes at a time, pulling down a door handle she can reach from the couch. She watches the latching mechanism go in and out of the door, over and over. She does this kind of thing all the time, and doesn’t like to be interrupted.

She loves to go on the swings, probably more than just about anything else.

I started this post a week ago and lots has happened in the past week but most of all we got a taste of spring. Most of the time the snow here is too dry to build a snowman but on Thursday we were able to build one out of melting snow. I didn’t get a picture of it, but here is Maren with it while it was melting yesterday: