Beckett, pumpkin, you are 14 months old now. I don’t know how much you weigh or how many inches long you are anymore. Those things seem to stop being important once you start walking and trying to talk. You’re no longer a play thing to be weighed and measured as a guage of your thriving. No, now you are a little boy, who is measured by how many teeth you have and how many animal sounds you can make.
And Beckett, you can make LOTS of animal sounds. You can tell us what a sheep, a cow, a snake, a bee, a chicken, a monkey, a lion, and a horse say. You even imitate an apathetic cat. We will ask, “Beckett, what does a cat say?” and you flippantly look at us and say “Mow.” Short and sweet, just like you!
Your favorite book is Goodnight Gorilla, and when you kiss all of the zoo animals in the book goodnight, I just want to keep you in my lap, reading the book over and over again for you for the next one hundred years. You laugh when the gorilla sneaks under the covers and snuggles in between the zoo keeper and his wife. A gorilla in bed is funny, indeed. Your sense of humor is quite keen.
This weekend we left you with Nanny and Aunt Cathy and Bella while we went to Atlanta for our fourth wedding anniversary. I can’t count the number of times your name came up. I can’t tell you how often we bragged about how wonderful you are to every person we talked to. We told them about how you love to play outside in the backyard, and how you pooch out your stomach and run down the hallway in the house naked after escaping the bathroom after your nightly bath. We brag that you can say almost 20 words in sign language, and that you walk up and ask for a snack by name using sign.
You are still the happiest little person. I hope you’ll always be smiling or laughing like you are at this stage in your life. I hope nothing ever takes that sparkle out of your eyes. I hope you always love strawberries, and squint when I turn off the light so that you can bring me back into focus as I’m standing over your bed saying goodnight. I hope you will always spin around in circles when you’re feeling silly, and pull your hat down over your eyes, walking forward with your hands out front to keep you from bumping into things because it makes us laugh until we cry.
I hope you’ll always be happy. We’ll do everything we can to make that happen for you. Consider it paybacks for all of the fun you’ve brought into our lives. We love you, your daddy and I do.