Happy Birthday, Finley Ellison!

I am in awe that it has been one year since Finn was born. It is a surreal feeling, one that I am not quite sure I can really wrap my head around at the moment. The memories of that day feel so near to me that it doesn’t seem possible that an entire year could have passed. At the same time, I don’t remember nearly as much as I would like to. That glorious, delirious, joyous haze we found ourselves in for at least a couple of weeks after he was born was such a profound and precious time. We will never, ever, ever experience life in quite the same way again. We were so utterly exhausted then, but it was an exhaustion that I feel we embraced with open arms. It was a strangely delicious feeling, to be so feeble, so completely unable to do anything but sit and hold my baby. I was focused only on loving my husband more than I ever thought was possible and getting to know and love this tiny new life we’d created together. Though I had been warned that the first month would be really challenging, I don’t think I was prepared for how much I would actually relish it. God was good to me to give me that perspective. Though I was more tired than I’d ever been in my entire life, I was more aware than ever before just how dependent I was on God. To be so tired and weak and clueless and yet to be able cast all of that upon Him, with the knowledge that He would take care of everything? What comfort! Ah, I just don’t ever want to forget that time or that awareness of my dependency on Him.

I will snap out of the past for a moment to consider the now one year old boy we have on our hands. He is a very sweet boy, we think. He is friendly and open and generous with his smiles. We are still figuring out the emerging facets of his personality, but in general, he is a very cheerful boy. He is also an observant boy, often furrowing his brow when he is intently studying something or someone. (Dave is a big brow-furrow-er and I think I may be as well.) Finn is very expressive; some have even said he is the most expressive baby they’ve ever encountered. I wouldn’t really know since babies were never on my radar before him. But I suppose I tend to be rather expressive myself so we know where he gets it from. Finn loves to play with his toys and books. In particular, he loves to pull out every item, one by one from the basket until he is sitting in a sea of toys and books. And of course, once they’re all out and strewn across the floor, he will pick just a few to actually play with. Finn’s newest discovery is his own will and the concept of reacting to things that he doesn’t appreciate, most notably having something taken from his hands. His “thing” is to throw his head back in, well, anger and thrash about until he has gotten his point across. I knew I would be confronted with my son’s sin sooner or later but it’s still a smack up side the head to witness such blatant behaviors from a one year old. It is challenging to bring discipline and correction when you can’t be at all sure that he understands why he is being corrected. But it must be done. This whole “my baby sins” thing has really just snuck up on us in the past few weeks. Or rather, there have been more evidences of this truth in recent weeks.

Something else that is not new is Finn’s total disinterest in food. Considering that he is well aware of his own will at this point, I am now realizing that his refusal to eat food has far more to do with him learning to exercise this will than it does with a genuine distaste for food. To say the least, we are kind of at our wit’s end with this challenge. Baby food, solid food, any food, whatever. It is all unwelcome. What is not unwelcome, however is mom’s milk. Good lord does that boy love his milk. And due to his increased activity over the past few months, he’s needed more sustenance than ever before. We are now up a minimum of 3 times a night to nurse and it is a-makin’ me crrrrazy. I have been taking some lactogenic herbal supplements off and on to make sure that I’m able to provide enough nourishment for him and apparently they are working just fine. But I would really really really like to be able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time. Short of force feeding him, I’m not sure what I can do. But we’re going to persevere.

For Finn’s birthday today, we had planned on taking our first family bike ride in the Old Northeast neighborhood I grew up in. Unfortunately, we had a little snafu with Finn’s bike seat so we had to postpone the ride until tomorrow. We just took some birthday portraits of our family in the park instead. There was a heavenly breeze coming off the bay and the air had that 70 degree chill we Floridians all crave at this time of year. It couldn’t have been nicer and it’s forecasted to be the same all weekend.

Here are a few of the photos that my budding photographer husband took at Flora Wylie Park. He did a good job with the 50mm 1.4 lens at such a wide aperture. (I just love this lens and focal length for portraits. It is a real beaut.) I also really love having photos of me and Finn together. We have so little of them compared with the hundreds upon hundreds I’ve taken of Dave and Finn.

I’m not sure where in this post I should make this statement so I’ll just put it here. One of my big “push projects” that I simply have to get done before the end of the year is to organize my 2011 photos and throw all the best ones up onto Flickr. What I should have been doing was a monthly photo sort-and-dump so that I wouldn’t find myself here in this overwhelmed, buried-underneath-tens-of-thousands-of-photos-literally feeling. To this I guess I can only say “Mah bad.”