How do you measure a year?

He still suckles in his sleep. I watch him over the crib railing, on the last night that he is a baby, in his yellow chicky pajamas, his legs pulled up under him and his chick-covered ball of a bottom in the air. His tongue moves rhythmically inside his mouth, suckling. He is so long in his crib and still so small. Were my other children this small at one? I don't remember it that way.

Through the crack between the black out curtains, the sapphire twilight sky is pierced by black pines. The final minutes of my last baby's first year tick away.

How do you measure a year, the song asks.

I have measured years in trips taken and countries visited.

I have measured years in billable hours.

I have measured years in semesters, in football game won and parties attended.

But never, until I became a mother, have I measured a year in heartbeats, in smiles, in naps and nursing sessions and milky sleeps, in teeth and inches and discoveries. In shots and well baby checks. In onsies outgrown.

Funny how I have come to find, relatively late in life for baby making and baby growing and baby birthing, that there are few yardsticks more satisfying, or more bittersweet.

Nate is one year old. He still suckles in his sleep. In another year he won't, but it's okay. I'm okay. We'll find other yardsticks together. Books read. Friends made. Bike rides taken. Maybe even countries visited. Hours spent grounded? Who knows? I know it will be just as satisfying and every bit as bittersweet.

My four - er, wait,


make that five(?) big kids.


Happy birthday, Babynater.


Or, maybe I should say, happy birthday, Nate.