Almost A Year....

Today my daughter is 51 weeks old.  She has been on this Earth for 361 days.  That's 8,684 hours.  She has already lived for 31,263,458 seconds.  And in less than a week she will turn a year old.  One whole year has come and gone already.  That means one year ago today I was sitting on this same couch, with a belly the size of the moon, wondering if the baby inside me would make an appearance on her due date.  I thought it was pretty clever that she was due on 7/11/11.  She, however, needed a few more days until she was ready to exist outside of me.  It's funny, our bodies are no longer physically tied together, but I still feel it.  I feel as if we're one person.  Only whole when we have each other.  And all that has happened in a single year.  She has grown from a tiny 7lb little wrinkled bundle of sticks, incapable of doing anything besides cry, suck, and poop, into an amazing, smart, beautiful little person with an entire spectrum of talents and preferences just beginning to emerge.  And I have grown from a girl stagnating in life, bored out of her mind with no idea of which direction to go, into a mother so enamored with her baby that every previous idea of I wanted isn't even comparable to what it is now.  Watching her as she's learning to walk alone is such an amazing experience.  And heart-wrenching at the same time.  It means that she really is growing up.  She won't be this small baby needing me for every part of her life for very much longer.  Today she learns to walk and tomorrow she'll be ready to move out on her own.  Moving away from home might be when the child leaves the nest, but learning to walk on her own is the process of her growing the necessary wings.  It feels me with tears of joy and tears of sadness both at the same time.  In one year my life has changed so dramatically and I have loved every second of it.  It terrifies me that time will keep on moving.  I'm reminded of the saying: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  How can it possibly get better than this?