Happy first birthday Ella!

This time last year I'd gone into labour - and decided to mow the lawn...
As I prepared for Ella's first birthday party (to be held – appropriately – on our lawn) I remembered that crazy, last-minute nesting urge.

I remembered a lot of other things, too. The crackle of the TENS machine, the dawn drive to the hospital over what felt like a thousand speed bumps, and the realisation that after months of waiting this was really happening: I was having a baby.

The memories were so fresh, I couldn't believe a year had passed.
The party was to be a low-key affair – a few friends and family, lured by the promise of chocolate fingers and cheese-and-pineapple on sticks. But things didn't get off to a good start.

The forecast threatened rain, and minutes before the guests were due we discovered that our fearless girl was terrified of balloons.

I cuddled her as she howled, and remembered the frightening second stage of labour: the news that the cord was caught around Ella's neck and the arrival of doctors with all their scary equipment.
But everything worked out for the best, and it wasn't long before I was holding my little girl to my chest as she gazed up at me with one big, blue, bleary eye open and the other closed.
And everything worked out with the party, too.

The sun shone, Ella cheered up as soon as we'd hidden the balloons, and a cat came to steal the last sausage from the barbie allowing her to show off her first word - “Dat,” meaning cat (and, if I'm honest, every other animal she sees as well).
I can't believe I'm the mother of a one-year-old.

I remember my awe a year ago at the sight of her tiny, wrinkled hands, clenched in fists. And as I look at them now, clutching a slice of birthday cake that's quickly covering her party frock, I think about how far she's come.

I've come a long way too. Everything's changed in the last year: my social life, my relationship with Chris, my work, my body, the fabric of my days and nights.

I've turned from an insecure new mum, sobbing at the slightest hint of criticism, into a confident old-timer (most of the time). And I've realised how precious family is: not just Ella and Chris but my wider family, my parents, and those family members I've picked up along the way – my close friends and in-laws.

They say that we learn and change more in the first year of life than in any other. But I think the first year of parenthood comes a close second.


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