On the move

Sunday the hubby and I cleaned the house, top to bottom and left to right. By the end of the day Monday, it looked just the same as it did Saturday morning before we started (well with a little less clutter). The babies on the move. She's reaching new things, toddling around and dare I say that a week before her 1st birthday she's become quite the little walker, explorer, say "no no" and do it anywayer (that is so totally a word).

This morning she got up early and with the onset of Autumn in the near future we stumbled downstairs in the DARK. I mean DARK people. I set her down, flipped a light switch and turned to ask her if she wanted a bottle. She was half way up the stairs in the DARK!

After I put the gate at the bottom of the stairs, while I made her morning bottle she practiced drumming on the trash can lid for awhile, emptied out my entire tupperware drawer and crawled into the fridge to explore the soda cans on the second shelf. That was um... 30 seconds of play by play.

While she ate her banana breakfast I recovered the kitchen floor from under the plastic debris piled everywhere and did a load of dishes. Within 2 minutes of getting out of her chair she had sprinkled raisins all over my clean kitchen floor, pulled every straw we own out of the cabinet and pulled the blinds partially open in the kitchen.

I left it there. It's not a battle I feel like facing this morning. Tonight when she goes to bed I'll get the joy of cleaning graham cracker out of the living room rug, getting the finger prints off my stereo face, putting all the toys away and trying to locate my keys (which she stole today around 11 am).

Suddenly, going to work every day seems a lot easier than staying home. Perhaps, if she wasn't so fearless it wouldn't be so bad. I mean some kids don't jump face first off of things, some kids don't climb into their toy box to reach the window blinds better, some kids don't knock down baby gates to get up the stairs or into the kitchen. But, my kid does.

And I love her. I love her more than you could possibly imagine and I'm proud of her every time she makes me want to scream and cover my head with the blankets and pretend to be invisible... I love her.

I love that she drives me crazy singing the same song every day for at least an hour, I love that I've read the same 4 books about 4 million times in 4 days. I love that she's climbing and walking and jumping. I love every broken english sentence and every wiggle worm moment. I just wish they were more like 45 seconds apart instead of BACK to BACK. So I could appreciate them more.