Dear Tristan - 8 months

Dear Sugar Bear,
It’s about this time that you should know your name. And you would. If your name was Sugar Bear. We’ve called you that so much that if you ask Connor who scratched him next to his eye, he’ll answer in a solemn whispering tone, “The Sugar Bear scratched me”. You will answer to Tristan as well, answer being a turn of the head and an expression of wonder at what you might be about to see.You have been pulling up and crawling like a champ. The crawling started right at 7 months and the pulling up two weeks later. You’ll be walking soon. You see your brother walking and you really want to do it too, but whenever you let go of something and take a step, it ends badly. Although not so badly that you might get upset… you just get back up and try it again.

You’ve proved to everyone that you really are my offspring by showing an intense love for cheese. Nothings better to you than a high chair full of shredded mozzarella cheese and everyone else sitting at our respective seats at the table so that you can beam with joy at us in between bites. You look over at me while you shove fistfuls into your mouth like, “MOM! You should TOTALLY check this stuff out! It’s spectacular! Dude!”

I thought that the kitty might have learned a very valuable lesson from your brother. All of those people that say they want to be reincarnated as cats might want to stop and consider the ramifications of having a brain the size of a kiwi fruit. This is a benefit to you however because he’s not as fast as he used to be and because he’s so desperate for love, he’s willing to suck up to anyone. Even the pink, drooling human that always puts his tail in his mouth. It’s a hard life for our cat, sleeping on a feather pillow for 17 hours a day in the sunshine. The other day I was cleaning the upstairs with you and the cat trailing behind me. I was bouncing from room to room attempting to organize the chaos before it swept me away and Pink was following right on my heels lest I accidentally drop a can of Tuna. I didn’t have to worry about you because you were so busy following the cat following Mommy from room to room you were too busy to put any of the five million pieces of carpet lint you manage to find like a radar into your mouth.

We’ve recently taken drastic steps to improve everyone’s well being. Our plan is to make sure everyone is getting enough sleep to ward off the cataclysmic chain of events that occurs around 5pm when everyone is tired and irritable. The first part of this plan was to move your brother to his “Big Boy Room” and let him get accustomed to it, while gradually acclimating you to your new room, (your brother’s old room) by rocking you to sleep in said room each night, until you were comfortable after a week or so and then moving you into your room and out of ours. We ended up moving you out of our room five days earlier because the prospect of being able to take a shower in the evening or turn on a light without worrying about waking you was so damn intoxicating that we just couldn’t stand it. And I don’t have words to describe how wonderful it is to be able to flush the toilet in our bathroom at night again. But even better than that is that you sleep so much better, only waking twice in the night as opposed to the usual five times you wake, hoping to end up in the bed with us. Sadly, at this same time your brother has decided that he will not nap in his new room and spends his time screaming from the room next to yours. But alas our plan is working.

Now that you are in the nursery, in the middle of the night, we get to rock you in the recliner. You are so sleepy and warm. You have that baby smell, which is so much better than new car even. And when you are done with your bottle, you don’t even need your paci, you just curl up on my chest and get rocked to sleep. I like your new room. We end up closer together, because we are farther apart.
Love,
Mommy