Starling Eliza Turns One

This little Starling girl! This little cherub! This little bird! This little waddling-about angel!

It never ceases to amaze me that a little tiny soul who just … wanders about the house, and cries to be held, and throws food off their highchair onto the floor, and gets into bathrooms and unrolls toilet paper rolls during a toilet paper shortage, and sometimes -- when being asked what a cat says, and after considering it for several moments -- says, "m-ow" … can be so enormously valued! 

And yet she is! She is! Has anyone ever, in all of history, been more loved? More adored? Has anyone ever been more important?

No. No one. I love this little being so completely and wholly.

One year ago I wrote this:

Every time I have a baby, I encounter a moment of panic where it seems the rough draft I have written for my life has suddenly been erased. Again. And no matter how frantically I scan the hundreds of empty pages in front of me, I can't see at all what happens next. But also, … there is this tiny, perfect person -- snuggling confidently into me as if I hold all the answers, and safety, and security in the world. And always there is love. So much. And that? Well, that seems like a powerful place to start. 

It was a powerful place to start. And a powerful place to continue. 

Happy one year little soul! You are an absolute treasure to me. (And I'm sorry you fell, on your birthday, and scratched your face on a metal bike basket that one of your siblings had carried into the house.)