one year.

Luka John Joseph turned one this week! Amazing. If you would have asked me a year ago if Lu would make it to his first birthday healthy, happy and "normal", I would have said, "enough with the questions- we're on our way to the NICU to gaze longingly at our new baby".



Luka is a really cool little baby if I do say so myself. We had a birthday party for him at Gymboree, and he had a blast crawling around and playing with his guests.











While I'm not normally keen on Lu having sugar at all, I did want to make him a smash cake. I made him a single layer banana cake with vanilla buttercream (all vegan, of course), and his hands were in it the second the cake was placed in front of him. And as I suspected, he didn't really eat any of it. He smashed some frosting into his mouth, made a sour face, then seemed irritated by the stickiness of it all. Ha.





Since the boy is 12 months now, we have been introducing more chunky foods. So far he has liked most everything as long as he gets to feed himself. Even chunks of avocado! Recent favorites are pasta rings (both semolina and brown rice) covered in pureed tomatoes and spinach or nutritional yeast sauce, smooshed blueberries, broccoli tops, tofu, white beans, wheat bread, and more. He also likes self feeding chunks of coconut oil. That's really messy, but makes for a nice smelling baby. Oh, the messes he makes.



Lu enjoys helping out at work. and by "helping", I mean crawling all over the place, making messes and trying to hurt himself on everything. Time to pad him up with packing material!





I have to admit, this year has been one of the most challenging of my life. Raising a little human is no joke, man. But getting to know our beautiful kid is completely worth the stress.



I can't imagine my life without you in it. Thanks Lu.