Torsten/picture catchup #5: 12 months – On the loose! (also: Thirty in thirty 2009 – #7)

N.B. I make this with the usual disclaimers and suggestions – that is to say, I know this post is being made well after the fact (8 months afterward, in fact), the letter is written based upon what I remember at the time, and if you want to see larger versions of the photos, click on them…

Dear Torsten,

Well, Mama’s gotten so far out of whack with posting that it almost seems pointless, but I’m going to try anyway.

Almost without us being able to catch a breath from your birth, you somehow turned a year old on us. In this month before your birthday, you did some amazing things. You somehow went from crawling to full walking around in the space of about 6-8 weeks, and it blew our minds. We came back from Europe and all of a sudden, we needed everything childproofed. It was nuts.

This month too held the election we’d all been waiting for. No more conventions and caucuses for Mama, and though you had rarely seen TV at this point, you and Mama spent a lot of the day watching what was going on.

Pictures from last month show your tentative attempts to walk from one object to another one about two feet away. At the beginning of this month, though, you got really daring… back and forth about eight feet, and it was much more walking and much less falling toward your target.

And then you’d sometimes just stop along the way. These were exciting times.

You’d really turned into such a character by this time too, full of glee and fun (and tiring both you and your parents out).

You did a lot of walking around at Papa’s office, which, during Winter Break, was both empty and provided plenty of room for you to learn how to get around on your feet. Also? Plenty of stuff to get into. I’ll forever remember this month as the month where you really learned how to get into everything.

You are also, I should add, even more of a Papa’s boy than you were before.

But you love Mama too, and you loved to get attention by doing silly things. (You still do, by the way

By the end of the month, you were officially a year old, and it showed. All signs of the little baby I held in my arms and rocked to sleep at night were gone, but Big Torsten is really just as exciting.

I’ll try to be better about writing your letters in the future, but I will say that even if I haven’t been able to write about every month like I’d like to, your father and I are savoring every moment we have with you.

You’re an awesome kid, Super T…

Love,

Mama