It was not unpleasant or unwelcome having my brain rewired, but it was suprising to feel it at such a biological, almost cellular level.  When she cried it triggered an animalistic fight or flight reaction.  Something in my limbic system demanded that I pummel and destroy whatever was causing her discomfort.  Her cries would jolt my autonomic nervous system and my pulse would race, I would sweat and become flushed and heated until I had changed or fed her and her cries subsided.  I would get so overheated that I started wearing loafers so that when she squalled I could quickly kick off my shoes.  Her cries were a cue to tear off my hat or sweater or I would become overheated.  Since we brought her home in frigid December, after changing her I would often look down at a now quiescent baby and wonder why it had suddenly gotten so cold.   

And when she was happy and cooing, we felt a need to keep her warm and safe as immediate and real as the dry feeling in the back of your throat when you are thirsty.   It felt like we could erect a force field around her by hovering over her protectively.  She had irrevocably and changed us into an entirely new species, the PARENT, homo sapiens overprotectivus.

If there were a speeding truck heading towards her, we would not even hesitate to throw ourselves in front of it.  If  there were a hungry leopard in our living room (don’t ask me why, we’ll just assume someone made some very poor decorating choices) and Natalie were crying, both Julie and I would INSTANTLY leap up and make noise to attract its attention so that it would come and eat us instead of her.  No thought, no hesitation.  Before she came into our lives we might have made the same decision hesitantly, after carefully weighing and analyzing the options.  By which time she would have been leopard elevenses.  But after meeting her, our Parent Brains were rewired to respond to any threat to her as instantly and automatically as jerking a hand back from a hot surface.

The newly rewired Parent Brain is so attuned to the least hint of complaint from its progeny that it creates hallucinations.  I would hear Natalie’s cries in white noise, even when I  knew full well that she was not in the same building.  I was worried until I spoke to other parents and realized that such auditory hallucinations were universal.  I never did bring up the olfactory hallucinations, though.  

The changes extended from the brain to the muscles and nervous symptoms.  I’d learned to quiet Natalie by bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet.  I would be out in public and hear a strange baby fuss, then realize I was bouncing up and down reflexively like Terry Francona trying to manage the Red Sox through another Tim Wakefield pitching performance.   A friend of my sister brought over her newborn for a visit.  When her baby began to fuss, my arm snaked out of its own accord, grabbed her bucket by the handle and began swinging it back and forth.  No volition, no conscious thought more than reaching out to break a fall.

Having a Parent Brain also makes you incapable of contemplating any danger, no matter how hypothetical or fictional, not only your child but ANY child.

Natalie was  perhaps only a couple days old when I tried to tell Julie the plot of “On the Beach.”  This is an influential book about nuclear war, and one of the first to depict graphically the horrors of the aftermath.  I told her about the American submarine captain trapped in Australia looking for a pogo stick to give to his son on his birthday, because he would be ‘going home to see him soon.’  Meaning that his son was already dead, and soon the radiation creeping down from the Northern Hemisphere would kill everyone who had survived the conflagration.   Though I’d read it several times and seen two movie adaptations, now I couldn’t relate the story without choking midsentence.   “JEEEZUS,” I sobbed, breaking into tears.  “What the hell is happening to me?”

It was my first warning that my newly rewired Parent Brain would be unable to tolerate depictions of children in danger.  I tried reading the revised anniversary edition of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.  No go.  That’s about a young girl tormented horribly and her mother’s frustration at being unable to help her or stop the torment. I got about a chapter into it.

Before, when our friends with children would post DIRE warnings on Facebook about car seats, bottled water, or free radicals, accompanied by VERY EARNEST pleas to pay attention to this IF YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN, I would snicker contemptuously.  Now I understood.  The mere suggestion of menace to any child is enough to send you into screaming histrionics.  I remember having friends over for dinner who told us that if the government ever tried to take their child away, they would fight back with lethal force.  ‘OK, sure, that’s understandable,” I guess. 

“NO,” they said.  “You don’t understand.  THEY WOULD BE DEAD.  I would KILL them.  A LOT!”  They obviously felt that they were not conveying adequately the seriousness of their convictions.  At the time I nodded earnestly and when they weren’t looking moved the sharp knives out of their reach. 

Now I understand.  The rewired parent brain is utterly incapable of nuance when it comes to threats to your children.  It responds to a fictional leopard or even the thought of a leopard as if there were a real one in the room, snarling hungrily.

These changes are not all defensive, though.  Our capacity for joy and love has been infinitely expanded as well.  I thought nothing could equal the tidal wave of joy that crashed over me when I stepped through the door to pick Natalie up from day care and she saw me and eagerly came crawling over, chuffing happily.  Then one day I stepped through the door and she was standing up.  “DA da,” she said delightedly, and came running over, her gait a controlled forward topple.

My heart, which I thought had grown large enough to encompass all the joy in the world, swelled even further as Natalie changed me once again.  As she does every single day.

We — your family — at least the part of it that traces back through your maternal grandfather — celebrate New Year’s Eve as a family tradition. It is important to me that you feel connected to this tradition, although it’s also highly traditional to find it distasteful (you’d be in good company among the generations of cousins who have preferred pizza). The tradition is this: we cook a supremely malodorous foodstuff, which goes by the wonderfully ethnic name bagna cauda, and everyone has to eat some in order to obtain good luck in the New Year. I made this year’s bagna out of two cans of anchovies, six cloves of minced garlic, and a stick of butter, all warmed on the stove until it cooked down into paste. (Olive oil is also an acceptable, traditional ingredient. Cream, no matter what your great-uncle Alan tells you, is not.)

Your father doesn’t like the stuff, but takes an obligatory taste every New Year’s Eve to ensure his continuing good fortune. I eat the rest. Some day I hope you will join me. In the meantime, I apologize for any good fortune of which I’m depriving you by not feeding you bagna cauda. At thirteen months you are a wonderfully adventurous eater — you have, to date, enjoyed sauerkraut, sashimi, palak paneer, injera with tibs, pâté de campagne, tortilla chips, oyster pie, collard greens, quiche lorraine, and hummus — but there are some things that, in my opinion, can wait. You’ll have plenty of bagna later in life.

Your life. Natalie’s life. The life of Natalie Eleanor Martin, the vast majority of which is yet to be lived.

You’ve been with us long enough — thirteen months of your actual company, plus an additional ten of your offstage presence — that you’d think by now we’d be over it. But your father and I are blown away afresh, several times a day at a minimum, at the breathtaking miracle of you. You are such an incredible kid, Natalie, with your tousled honey-blonde mullet and sparkling dark eyes and velvety baby skin and perfectly musical speaking voice. When I walk into the room, you meet my gaze, light up, and declaim “Mama!” and it just slays me. I’ve accomplished a number of things in my life that make me proud, but most of those accomplishments began and ended with me. You, meanwhile, started with me and kept going. I can’t even think of you as my greatest accomplishment, since so much of what you are is all you, and will continue to be. You’re your own greatest accomplishment, Natalie, and every day with you is better than the day before.

When I was pregnant with you, I was excited, but also terrified. I had no idea how I’d deal with a fussy, quarrelsome, difficult infant. Now I can say, with a year’s hindsight, that I still have no idea how to deal with a fussy, quarrelsome, difficult infant, because you were none of those things. At the risk of jinxing your adolescence or your eventual sibling(s), I’ll say it aloud: you were easy, Natalie. You never did anything that didn’t make sense. And you’re the only baby I’ve ever heard of who’s been this way.

It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true: you were the perfect infant. You were not colicky or fussy. You hardly cried at all, and when you did, you were easily soothed. Most importantly, you slept like an angel. You’d wake to eat, and nine times out of ten, you’d drift right back to sleep at the boob without troubling your folks with any loud noises or necessary diaper changes. You napped for three hours in the morning, and then another three in the afternoon. You slept through the night at four and a half months and kept doing so until you caught your first bug at almost nine months. Even now, you are more likely than not to sleep through any given night without waking up. And if you do wake up, it’s just to make a few noises and then drift back to sleep after judicious application of a botbot or a binky.

Everyone told me to enjoy your infancy because it would fly by, and I did enjoy it, but it didn’t fly by. Yes, it’s tough to believe that you’re already a year old; but every day of that year was a day fully lived, every moment a gift, and I savored them all. I can’t believe my incredible luck, and yours: we live in a really neat place at a really neat time, and the family you chose to be born into is terrific, not to mention besotted with you. Even when you would have one of your rare nighttime fusses and I’d be up rocking you in the dark, it felt like a privilege, a scene without which my life would not have been complete. (I might have felt differently if you’d been screamier or less sleepy in general. But — it bears repeating — you were perfect.)

Even so, I was thrilled when you got into daycare and I could go back to work. My job is better now than it was before, and I’ll confess, I’m glad that you’re not home alone with a nanny. I am delighted that you spend your days in a room full of your peers, surrounded by fun toys and books and high spirits, supervised by competent professionals who take terrific care of you and have taught you (among other things) how to eat solid food, how to drink from a sippy cup, how not to hit people, and what to do when someone tells you to Come Here. It takes a village to raise a child, and they’re my village.

(As are your grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors and dozens of folks who love you just because you’re Natalie. You would not believe the support network you’ve got here, and will always have.)

They had good material to work with, too. You get all the credit for being you, Natalie; the rest of us can instruct and advise, but you’re the one who executes. You have always intuitively recognized what a situation required. When we took you on a plane for the first time, you figured out all by yourself that it was wisest to nap through both takeoff and landing. When relatives would visit you, you understood that the proper reaction was one of instant and delighted recognition. When we’d plop you down in a high chair in a strange restaurant, you knew that the right thing to do was to keep calm, smile at the wait staff, and eat, or at least play quietly with, the food we’d share with you. Where many babies are shy or scared or overwhelmed by the unceasing firehose stream of life experiences that pummel you in your first year, you never flinched or stepped back from anything interesting. New person? New place? New foodstuff? Bring it on! Natalie’s game. Natalie can handle it. We can always count on Natalie.

And now you’re a year old, and you can toddle across a room at speed, deliver a toy into my hand upon request, perform feats of fine motor coordination that wow your pediatrician, and, my favorite, giggle and fling your arms around my knees. We’ve loved you from the moment we met you, but roughly between eleven and twelve months, you very clearly started to love us back. You are not stingy with your love; you’ll just as happily run up to hug your grandparents, or your favorite teachers at daycare. But when you catch my eye, break into a full-face grin, and come tearing across the room to crash into my lap, this is a moment unique to us, a mother-daughter thing. You’re the daughter. I’m the mother. And even a year into it, that’s still an amazing thing.

I love sharing these moments with you, and I wish that you could remember them. There are so many little things that I would love to preserve in amber for you, so that we could look back on them together some day with a chuckle. Like the way you love to poke people’s noses to hear what sound effect they’ll produce. (This was the hit of my office holiday party, incidentally.) Or the way I blow you three big kisses goodbye when I drop you off at daycare, and you wave back at me with a big smile. Or the lullaby I improvised to rock you to sleep: Mommy loves you best, you’re my baby girl. Natalie, Natalie, Natalie, Natalie, you’re my whole wide world.

You are, my baby girl. You are.

Love,
Mommy

Six weeks old: smiling at us.

Eight weeks old: talking.

Two months old: asking for toys.

Three months old: offering political opinions and other demands.

Four and a half months old: giggling.

Four and a half months old: laughing at Daddy.

Five months old: laughing at Grandma Judy.

Six months old: playing with the cat.

Seven months old: playing peekaboo.

Eight months old: eating fancy handmade baby food.

Eight and a half months old: first actual crawling.

Nine and a half months old: deciding that pureed food is more fun to spray than consume.

Ten months old: swinging at Stead Park.

Ten and a half months old: first steps, assisted by a push toy.

Eleven months old: toddling along behind the clacking crocodiles.

Eleven and a half months old: standing unsupported.

One day shy of a year old: practicing her words.

One year, five days old: WALKING.

Our daughter has been with us for a whole year. An entire revolution around the sun. We have been a family of three for 365 days, and I have loved every one of those days. Every hour. Almost every minute. A year ago a child shot out of my body like a cannonball. Today she crawled over to me, clambered into my lap, pulled herself upright on my shoulders and said “mmmmah.” There are no words in human language that express how this feels.

(Which confounds me. Didn’t we evolve language precisely to express just such abstract, sublime, profoundly human emotions and experiences? Isn’t that the point of it? And yet language fails me, even though I have never felt so human as I do as someone’s mother. As Natalie’s mother.)

She has words now, sounds with unmistakable meaning: dada, mama, uh-oh, and duh! which I think is her general-purpose demonstrative: That-Thing-I-Am-Indicating-To-You. I’m still convinced that she says duck and dog too, as well as several phonetic variations on kitty cat, which can range from “titi” to “tita” to, well, “duh.” And she can say “hi” (which sounds like haaaaa) and goodbye (which also sounds like haaaaa), while waving to you with a gesture that resembles turning a doorknob. Most of her utterances still resemble the gibberish spoken by science-fiction aliens, though: t’khol t’khol t’khol! or diggu diggu! or, sometimes, a continuous velar fricative stream that sounds like she’s working to dislodge an enormous loogie.

But she isn’t. She long ago ceased to spit up, has mostly finished drooling (we’re up to six teeth and counting), and generally has graduated from the effluvia of infancy to the unmentionable outputs of maturity, which I’ll do her the favor of not discussing on the Internet. She will, however, still spray pureed baby food into your face if you manage to sneak any into her mouth, but that’s your own fault, because she’s made it clear for AGES now that she eats only big-people food, thank you very much.

And she is a Big Person. This morning Natalie weighed in at twenty pounds, fourteen ounces, just an unmentionable output shy of 21 pounds (and the fiftieth percentile), and measured a solid 29 inches tall. Her pediatrician was pleased with her motor and verbal skills, but what truly impressed him was her habit of pointing at things, constantly. (Apparently this is a good indicator of the absence of autism. That’s good. Otherwise it would border on rude.) She is no longer a baby, but not yet a toddler, I don’t think: all of her efforts at walking still involve at least one anchor point, even if it’s just Mommy’s talismanic index finger that she grasps like Dumbo’s magic feather as she balances herself, takes a step, rebalances, and takes another step. I predict unsupported walking within weeks, if not days.

Tomorrow is Natalie’s first birthday party, a Saturday-afternoon fete at Nana and Grandpa’s house, with the weather predicted to be clear and warm enough for the numerous prepubescent guests to play in the playhouse in the back yard. I’ve baked a coconut almond cake which I’ll frost tomorrow morning; we’ve ordered barbecue from Red Hot & Blue and chocolate-covered strawberries from CakeLove; and Grandma Barbara came down from New Jersey with a bag full of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Natalie’s godfather Patrick even flew in from San Francisco to join the festivities. We’ll toast the first year of her life surrounded by family, friends, good food and good company, and Noodles will have her first officially sanctioned taste of refined sugar. (I think they may have snuck her some Teddy Grahams at day care. But we’ll pretend that never happened.)

She’ll remember none of it, of course; in all likelihood she’ll remember nothing from this entire year. But we’ve now laid the foundation stones, the roots, the subconscious basis for the person she’ll grow up to be; the person she is already becoming, more and more every day. And I am as delighted with the outcome as I’ve been throughout the entire process.

I hope she is, too.

Tooling along behind that thing, she can get almost all the way to a full-out run.
She can toddle, deliberately and with balance, while holding onto only one adult finger.
And, if you distract her with a piece of cheese, she can do this:

Her record for standing unsupported is 45 seconds, which involved numerous pieces of cheese. We haven’t yet convinced her that she can stay standing when there’s no cheese involved. Perhaps cheese-free standing will be her next developmental milestone.

OBSESSION WITH CHEESE UPDATE: Proceeding apace. Natalie’s favorite thing on earth right now is a Trader Joe’s Fresh Mozzarella stick, which she can crush in less time than it takes me to cut it up or her. She is clearly her mother’s daughter.

I am not one of those women.

No petite delicate flower here. I am neither an athlete nor blessed with a genetic predisposition toward metabolic efficiency. When I got pregnant, I gained enormous weight. And after I gave birth, it stuck to me like glue and didn’t go anywhere.

I don’t know exactly what I weighed when we conceived, so I couldn’t tell you how much weight I actually gained as a direct function of pregnancy. But if we use the weight on my driver’s license as a fair baseline, and compare it to what I weighed on my due date (pictured above), I was heavier by a breathtaking seventy-three (73) pounds. Thirteen of those departed along with Natalie. The other 60 did not, no matter how long and hard I breastfed, how much water I drank, or how many Mommy & Me Yoga classes I managed to attend.

It sucked. Months and months after my daughter’s birth day, I still couldn’t squeeze my massive postpartum body into even the loosest of my pre-pregnancy clothes. I lumbered around in nursing tops, Pajama Jeans (no joke), and UGG boots, bitter and disgusted with my slothful and apathetic metabolism. The last straw came when I noticed that one of my toenails had turned purple and was about to fall off, the way runners’ toenails do. Only mine had died from nothing more than the constant burden of bearing my weight.

I had two options. I could give up: quit lamenting my state, and if not embrace it, at least learn to accept it as the price of motherhood. (Sure you’re back into plus sizes and frumpy shoes, but isn’t your beautiful baby girl worth it?) Or I could step up: grab my thorny problem with both hands, wrestle it into submission, and reclaim my self-image by brute force. So what if I’m not naturally thin? Turns out I wasn’t naturally fertile, either, but that didn’t stop me from having a baby. I owe no deference to nature.

Fortunately, there was a solution at hand. It was time to go back “on plan,” and re-embrace the only diet that’s ever worked for me.
(Yes, it’s the same one that advertises in all the banner ads. I’m not proud.)

They’re not paying me for my endorsement, so I won’t go on ad nauseam about how sorcerously effective Medifast is. But boy, is it. You eat five daily servings of spaceman food — instant soups and bars and suchlike — and one ordinary meal consisting exclusively of lean protein and green vegetables. Carbs are anathema; you touch no bread, no grains, no alcohol, no root vegetables, no fresh fruit. And somehow, magically, you lose two or three pounds a week for as long as you can keep it up. (& calls it a “body hack.”)

I went On Plan at the end of April, right after polishing off the last piece of Natalie’s christening cake. I’d done this program before, but never for so long. Shedding five dozen pounds was going to take months, months I knew I’d spend pining for my next allotted packet of food-powder and savoring a single piece of gum for hours on end. I would miss strawberry season. Then cherries. Then peaches, nectarines, plums. I’d have to beg off on countless brunches, happy hours, prix-fixe menus, and other occasions where everyone around me would be enjoying things that contained carbs. And all I’d have to sustain me would be my eyes on the prize, a hardboiled faith in the program, and another cup of coffee.

Still, my blackened toenail reminded me, it beats the alternative.

By the end of my maternity leave, I’d been on plan for roughly six weeks. My BMI had decreased from “obese” to “overweight,” but I still had to bite back the shame of returning to work in maternity clothes, six months postpartum. (My colleagues politely declined to notice. Thank you, colleagues.) Alas, it was what it was. At least I was doing something.

And would continue to.

The secret to a long haul, I’ve found, is frequent rest stops. On special occasions I’d give myself a day off — but never more than a day — from the diet (although I will confess that, as time passed, the definition of “special occasions” expanded from “someone’s wedding” to include “Restaurant Week” and even “the Groupon is about to expire”). More often, I thanked myself with carb-free, non-caloric rewards: massages and mani-pedis, body scrubs and wraps and Fancy Product, and even a few hardcore medspa treatments as prizes for major milestones. In times of duress, rather than look in the mirror and judge the progress I had yet to make, I instead would stand in my closet and let the size 6′s be my cheerleaders. Red silk skirt from Barcelona, I’m coming for you. Yellow seersucker Brooks Brothers dress, it won’t be long. And every Tuesday morning, when I stood on the scale, the numbers were just a little easier on the eyes.

The months wore on. Aside the episodic feast day, I stayed on plan. My toenail grew back. I eventually dispatched the maternity wardrobe to storage with gleeful relief. And my progress on plan, however slow, was punctuated with little private gasps of delight: The re-emergence of my collarbones, my shoulderblades, my waist. The disappearance of the extra chin. A return to “normal weight” BMI. My revived ability to wear high heels without agony. The day I noticed that my wrist was smaller than my daughter’s thigh. The day I finally fit back into my beloved Brooks Brothers dress, the one I wore to my bridal shower.

And today. The day I finally made it. As of this moment, I weigh exactly what my driver’s license says I do. Which is sixty (60) pounds less than I weighed when I went on plan at Easter, and seventy-three (73) pounds off my pregnancy peak. My goal was to lose the baby weight by Natalie’s first birthday, and with weeks to spare, I’ve done it.

Grab a glass of something that contains carbs and join me now in a toast. To six months of unremitting discipline. To Natalie, who is absolutely worth it. To &, my constant support in all things. To the miracle of modern science, without which I would neither have a baby nor look as though I hadn’t.

And to moving mountains. It can be done.

This month saw Natalie’s first Halloween, and because she is her father’s daughter, she had not one but two costumes. & had been cleaning out our coat closet when he happened upon Grandma Judy’s silver mink fur coat. “This looks like a Cruella De Vil coat,” he said, and, because he is &, proceeded to make it so. Soon thereafter, I came home from work to find a pile of packages on the countertop: a cigarette holder, a shock wig, a pair of elbow-length red satin gloves, a fluffy spotted romper for Natalie. &’s own dogcatcher costume was comparatively simple, and at our annual pumpkin-carving party, we were a matched thematic set:

But Auntie Darlyn had also been thinking of Natalie (and Buford), and surprised us with another package — a matching set of costumes for the two of them. Buford, alas, refused to disguise himself as Darth Vader, but Natalie made a most fetching Princess Leia at the daycare Halloween parade.
(“The only princess allowed in our house!” I joked.)

This is my daughter, in the last gasps of her infancy, at eleven months. She has four teeth — two front top, two front bottom. Two more, flanking the top two, have been lurking for several weeks but have not yet peeked out. Natalie’s honey-blonde hair has thickened and grown long enough to muss, but not quite enough to tangle. She continues to say things that sound like possible words, or at least like attempts to mimic us (best so far: “Ah-nah!” to visiting baby Annabelle). This morning, she took my hand, pulled herself up to standing, and took several steps, holding on to my hand and nothing else. She may not be full-on walking and talking yet, but she’s so close, you can see it from here.

And the next time we dress her in a red onesie and pose her next to Gatsby the teddy bear, it’ll be her first birthday.

It’s dizzying to reflect on the ungodly quantity of human development crammed into one’s first year on earth. By now Natalie is more child than baby: pulling herself up and cruising along the furniture, singsonging strings of syllables (her favorites include not only ma-ma and da-da, which may or may not mean us, but also ning-ning, which means nothing that we can decipher), grabbing handfuls of sauerkraut or spinach curry off my plate and cramming them into her mouth with delight. When did the crumpled spidery creature that burst forth from my loins last year become so human?

This process is both amazing and entirely commonplace. When my daughter lets go of the coffee table with one hand, steadies herself with the other, turns to face me and gives me a giant four-toothed smile, it is miraculous and unique and priceless. Yet every able-bodied adult human has gone through the exact same stage. We all learned to locomote. We all acquired language. We all cut teeth. It shouldn’t be so impressive when a new person does it. And yet, as I watch Natalie level up on a near-daily basis, I am amazed by her singularly incredible talents. Holy crap, that’s my daughter, and she’s taking the oath of office making her Carnegie Hall debut feeding herself.

I’ve tried to avoid waxing rhapsodic about Noodles’ regularly-scheduled accomplishments, since no matter how much they impress me, at the end of the day they’re to be expected in the ordinary course of childhood. To the extent that I’ve strayed from this goal, I apologize for joining the herd of parents who are shocked, awed, and simply must tell you about the miracle of their offspring’s most routine developmental milestones. But I would be remiss in my parenting if I failed to note on the public record that Natalie has, quite possibly, uttered her first actual word.

Here’s how it went down. Natalie was in the bath, playing with her favorite family of toy ducks. “What’s that?” I asked her, holding up one of the ducks. “What’s that, Natalie? Is that a duck? A duck!”

She looked at the duck, looked at me, and said “Dah!”

“Duck!” I repeated, encouraging her.

“Dah!”

“Duck!”

“Dah!”

Granted, “da” is one of her favorite syllables. Frequently she will give entire monologues consisting of variations on the theme: “da-da-dadada-DADADA!!! did-dud-dud-did-did-ditt!” But this struck me as something new. The intentional monosyllable, the deliberate inflection, the light in her eyes as she repeated after me: all these things convinced me that, at the age of not-quite-eleven months, Natalie had made the inscrutable connection between object, meaning, and utterance. That thing was a duck, and she knew that the sound “duck” meant that thing, and she said so.

And then, not fifteen minutes later, she said it again. “Dah!” Only this time there were no ducks in sight. I think she was talking, if anything, about our basset hound Buford.

So her first word may be Duck. It may be Dog. Or it may not have happened yet, and all of this magical association of sound and sense may still be a figment of my parental imagination.

But this, this at least, is a milestone that’s not just in my head:

It’s not real walking, the kind you do while using your core strength and balancing upright without holding on to any supports. But it counts. There’s my little Supreme Court justice, toddling behind a plastic toy truck. And her awestruck mother has never been so impressed.

(Until next week.)

Scant days before the ten-month anniversary of her birth, Natalie decided she was tired of gumming her food. On Thursday, September 29, her first tooth — the lower right incisor — broke through to daylight. I stuck a non-silicone spoon in her mouth to verify the presence of the long-awaited dens primus, and was rewarded with a wonderful click-click-clicking sound as I tapped her lower gums. Eureka! Toothless no more!

Not to be outdone by its fellow, her second tooth promptly followed the next day. And if you hold her upside down (which you should, because she loves it, and there are few things as awesome as the appreciative belly laughs with which she’ll thank you) you can see that a pair of incisors worthy of Bugs Bunny are straining to emerge from Natalie’s upper gums. I may be imagining it, but it looks like she may have another tooth or two on deck as well. (Our restful nights of sleep, already a threatened species since Noodles recovered from her August fever, are now verging on extinction under the assault of the Midnight Teething Howler Demon.)

It’s another giant leap forward from babyhood to childhood. She’s been taking so many of these, it’s tough to keep up.

Look how thick her hair is getting. Look at the depth in that gaze. She’s looking less and less like a baby every day, especially as she gets better and better at standing up. She can’t do it unsupported yet, but she will pull up on anything she can reach — cabinets, furniture, her crib, the coffee table, the pack & play, even stairs (although she hasn’t quite figured out how to crawl up them yet; that may be next week’s achievement). She’s reached a respectable 18 pounds 13 ounces and 27.5 inches as of this morning’s ten-month checkup: dead-on 50th percentile for weight, slightly below for height, slightly above for head circumference. Clearly she’s getting adequate nutrition from all of the baby food that she isn’t spraying in our faces.

Watch that video again. There’s the most amazing new thing that Natalie has shown us in the past month, greater than clickable teeth or standing on two feet. Our daughter is developing a sense of comic timing. She not only laughs with us at things that are funny. She is learning how to make us laugh. In many small ways we see her coming to master the concept of cause and effect, but this may be our favorite.

And now our family mantra, “Every day we laugh together,” includes her too.

It’s so final, to look at that bag and think this is the last breastmilk I’ll ever give my daughter. We quit lactating back in July, but Natalie hardly noticed, as she progressed enthusiastically from botbots to spoon-fed purees to sippy cups and Baby Mum-Mums. Now, if I offered her the thawed contents of this bag in a bottle, or mixed it in with her daily breakfast cereal, she’d gamely consume it without a second thought.

She’d have no idea that it would be the last time she’d ever taste her mother’s milk.

There’s no reason to save it, really. My lame excuse for hanging on to it (in case anyone asks) is that I’m saving it for the next time Natalie gets sick, so she can benefit one last time from its medicinal properties. But it’s been several weeks since Noodles last tasted breastmilk, and she hasn’t gotten sick yet. Meanwhile, this bag has just hit the five-month mark, which, according to many, is the end of the useful life of frozen breastmilk. There’s no reason to keep it around. It has no talismanic powers. It won’t make me lactate again. And do we really need to preserve any relics from our pitiful breastfeeding campaign, now that the ordeal is past?

So I’ll give it to her. Of course I will. Maybe even today. But when I do, I’d like to observe the occasion with appropriate ceremony. This is powerful stuff we’re about to run out of. It should be served with honor.

On the other hand, it failed us. Our unhappy and ultimately futile attempts at exclusive breastfeeding were the one false note in our pregnancy-childbirth-infancy continuum, which otherwise was nigh on perfect. I can look at that bag of breastmilk and confess to some serious hard feelings. Clearly I have not forgiven it.

What kind of ceremony, then, would be appropriate?

I don’t do anti-ceremonies well. There’s just no good way to vent one’s spleen in a manner befitting the ages, as far as I can tell. In perhaps the most iconic anti-ceremony of my life, I walked out of divorce court, marched myself straight to a table for one, and raised a glass of champagne to the ex, “you magnificent bastard.” I don’t regret the toast, but in retrospect, I wish I’d chosen better words. If there were any.

I’m much prouder of my contemporaneous decision to shut up, to leave the silence ringing between us until he turned and left the courthouse first. The last word I ever said to him was “no.” And while the fresh bitterness of my D-day toast has faded and gone flat, the silence continues to improve with time.

Lesson learned: mean words will fail you. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing at all.

So we’ll have no mean words for the last gasp of my lactation. No anti-ceremony. And no overstating either the good or ill effects of our breastfeeding experience. Instead we’ll simply speak the truth, perhaps the best valediction for a mixed blessing:

Farewell, nectar.
You sustained life.
And now life goes on.

And so it shall.