One Year and One Week

Cass is one year old. He has been one for one week, after a party (see pics) with the hat he wore more than I thought he would and the cake he wanted nothing to do with. We’ve turned the corner, no longer seeing the baby in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller, Cass growing bigger and bigger.

I cannot help but remember one year ago, when he was only one week old. Stuck somewhere between the dueling emotions of love and fear, equally overwhelming, I wondered how I would make it through the next day, the next hour, with no sleep and even less confidence, my bed-ridden body still throbbing sore from the experience of giving birth. I remember how Cass still sounded foreign on my tongue, after calling him The Bean for nine months. My new flat belly felt hollow, and Cass didn’t yet feel comfortable in my arms.

Those first few weeks, I scribbled notes about when he ate, for how long and on what breast. I took maniacal care to write down every detail about his bowel movements and sleep schedule, and cried when I forgot. It seemed like the only thing I could do—record his every action (or non-action). I felt like an untrained scientist, monitoring the Earth’s phenomena, trying to recognize patterns within the data sent by geostationary satellite. But all it ever did was make me realize how little control we had. Ryan started calling him Botcha Galoop. It never made any sense to me, but I humored him anyway. Nothing made any sense to me then.

His nicknames continued, even if they lasted only an afternoon, as he grew and developed—at a rate that now seems impossibly fast. When we swaddled him during that first month, he looked just like a little bug—with bulging eyes and skinny, uncoordinated limbs, herky-jerky with movement. We called him Bug or Buggy or even Bugaboo (which is something Ryan called me when we first met, long before anyone had a stroller of the same name). I also called him Bunny from time to time, because his new brown hair was coming in soft like bunny pelt. And it rolled off my tongue, as I caressed his soft skin and fuzzy head, like he was my little pet. I could run my hand over that skin for hours, without being any less surprised by its silkiness each time.

Two nicknames I cannot quite explain: Sweet Pickle and Babykins. But at the time, they seemed to fit him, all baby food, activity blankets and gummy smiles.

Little Loverpants came when he learned to wrap his little arms around my neck—kind of like a hug, but needier—and I had to pull them off like stickers. Little Professor when he started paying attention to books, rapt by the sound of my voice, no matter what I was saying. These days he’s too impatient, too busy, to make it through the same book twice.

And then, always in circulation: Casserole, Casanova, Cassiopeia, Cassie, Cass Man, Cassius, Cassmatic.

These days, I call him Cass mostly. His name fits him—the little toddler, whose personality has grown into the curl of the C and the Double-S. We play, and he understands what it means to hide and then seek. Kind of. He doesn’t really like the seek part. He laughs, and knows when he’s being funny. He imitates, blowing on the tulips instead of smelling. He blew on his peas last night, just like Ryan did. He kisses and hugs. He rubs banana in his hair, making it stick out like one of those trendy kid hairstyles in magazines. This spring, neighbors started calling him Nature Boy, because he prefers sticks and stones and mulch and dandelions to blocks and books and plastic anything. This is just Cass. He wants to be outside all day, and again after dinner, commanding the sidewalk, arms outstretched with whatever he can pull from the flower garden. He earned the first of many skinned knees today, crying until he realized there was a rock beside his hand that he could pick up and fondle and carry around like a trophy. He pulls on grass and eats dirt. He waves at people and cars driving by, stray cats. He laughs at anyone who smiles in his general direction.

At night, he smells pungent, like dirty hands and sour toddler sweat and cheerios. The baby scent, light and fragile, is long gone. Sometimes I get a whiff of it, lingering, but it never reminds me of Cass, the one-week-old version of the boy I now know. And love more than I ever knew I could.

Happy Birthday, Cass.