It's funny how I still got so worked up about Miles' birthday and what I as his mother was doing for him. For example, the day before, I ordered a birthday cake. I had assumed that I would bake him a tasty little birthday cake and decorate it myself like a duck or train. My mom had always made our cakes, and besides, I'm quite a good cook even if I have no experience decorating cakes. It just felt like the maternal thing to do. Nevertheless, in the end I didn't do it. Work, laziness, I don't know... I felt guilty about buying the cake, so much so that I asked the woman on the phone to leave room on top so that I could decorate it with ducks myself. (I let them do the writing since my handwriting is terrible.) I bought a tube of yellow glazed frosting, and the next morning I tried to replicate the rubber ducky in 2-D. You can see the result...
I managed to do one little duck ok, then got ambitious and started another, when the liquid frosting gushed out of the tube. After several attempts to even out the belly and tail feather, that one turned into a mama duck. By the way, I know this guilt thing is unreasonable, and once I got past the decision, I didn't subject myself to much more of it and was able to throw myself into decorating the house with balloons and streamers and giving Miles birthday kisses every 5 minutes.I won't make another boring list of milestones, but I do need to announce that Miles is walking! After 4 weeks of taking a couple of steps at a time, the day before his birthday he took off across the room. Now I'd say he gets around 70-30 walking vs crawling. What's more, he really enjoys it now. He holds his arms up, bent at the elbow, and lets them flap a bit as he walks toward you, making his excited "Look at me!" wheezing noise.
This is Miles earlier on his birthday at a hobby farm. He had just as much fun touching straw and pumpkins as petting the goats and sheep.
