Dear Peanut,

How can you be one year already? The year has zoomed by with unprecedented speed!

You are growing in to such a little man with more personality than we sometimes know how to handle. Everywhere you go people watch you, comment on your personality, and can’t help but smile and wave back at you. Even yesterday, as we attended a five stake gathering in the enormous BYU Marriott Center, you caught so many people’s attention despite being surrounded by hundreds of other people. You were smiling, waving, puckering up for kisses, and even showing off your impressively long tongue. Coming from parents who aren’t particularly fond of the spotlight, we’re not sure where this love of attention came from, but we do think it’s pretty hilarious.

When we went to the doctor for your twelve month checkup, you were advanced in almost every single area of development, except talking. However, despite your lack of words (“mama” is your only consistent word..a few others have come and gone), you are still able to communicate amazingly well. We never pushed baby sign language on you, although I did say “all done,” “milk,” and “more” in Sign every so often, but suddenly you’re signing these three words all over the place and using other methods to communicate what you want. At least once a day you’ll start whining, and when I ask what you want you walk to the fridge, reach for the handle, and then look at me. Smart boy. And although you don’t say words, you know what many of them mean. We can ask you to clap, wave, fold your arms, go get a book (or anything, really), put something away, give a kiss, point to the light or clock, and more, all without any physical or pointed direction and you know immediately what to do. You’re also learning body parts, and we’re constantly asking you to point to your toes, your ear, your nose, or your teeth, which you’re learning so well. Oh, and after a week of us asking, you finally hold up one finger when we ask, “how old are you?” It is quickly followed by you clapping your hands and yelling, since that’s what we did every time after you learned this trick.

One of your new found interests within the last month or so has been cooking. Every night as I pull out pots and pans, or mixing bowls and beaters to make dinner, you walk over and reach out to be picked up. You love staring into the kitchenaid as bread dough mixes, leaning over a pot of soup and helping to stir, and even going back and forth from the pantry with ingredients. Even when I’m not cooking and we have left the pantry door open, you’ll go get some ingredients, a large cooking pot, and a wooden spoon, and start mixing things up (combined with a few toys, of course). We find it particularly hilarious when you try to carry heavy ingredients from the pantry, like our large container of honey, or the tub of rice. You are so determined to carry it, but your face turns red and there is a lot of grunting involved as you heave a container half your size across the living room.

Probably my favorite thing about you getting older is your increased attention span. Every day you’ll go to your room and come back carrying a big stack of books, and then we’ll sit on the couch together and read them one by one. We’re still working on not tearing out the pages of non-board books, and some of the longer books with more words and less pictures are sometimes boring to you, but I treasure those times when you’ll sit next to me for long periods of time, your head leaning on my chest and we just read together.

This has been one crazy and life changing year, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything in the entire world. You are our sunshine!

Love, Mommy