Dear Eleanor,

Today you turned 11 months old. I think all three of us would rather forget this past month. First you came down with a cold. Then I got sick, and then Dad, and then you got the flu. We’ve finally all recovered, and these past few days have felt magical just because we’re healthy.

Even when you were sick, you still loved to eat. When you see me with food, you always want a bite. And I almost always share, assuming that you’ll learn to stop begging when you taste whatever I’m eating. Surely a baby wouldn’t like lentil soup. Or cooked spinach. But you eat it all. When you get a little older, you’re going to be appalled that you ate cooked spinach. That tops the List of Yuck for most kids. A few things that kids would rather eat: dirt, bugs, dog food.

As I fed you one day, I opened my mouth to see if you would share, and you did. You pushed your chubby fist toward me and stuck a piece of carrot in my mouth. Same with a banana. But the day you were eating cheese and I opened my mouth, well, that was different. You held the cheese next to my mouth but refused to let go. You snatched it back and put it in your own mouth. You looked pleased with yourself. Yes, you appreciate my giving you life and all, but that piece of cheese is way too much to ask in return.

When I started this whole Mom job, I didn’t intend to buy you any dolls unless you asked for them. I didn’t want you to be stereotyped because of your gender. Alas, a few dolls have shown up anyway, and your favorite is a Cabbage Patch Kid that used to belong to Dad. I don’t know how to break this to you nicely, so I’m just going to say it. Eleanor, your baby is homely. Lyndon Lionel has blue paint on his bald head, and he’s wearing a little tan get-up that makes him look like a prison inmate. Like a good mother, you love him anyway. You drag him around the house with you, and I’ve showed you how to pat him on the back. You do this incessantly, though most of the time your pats land on his face or head so it looks more like you’re hitting him.

The good news is that all of your care-taking has transferred to the pets as well. You’ve started patting Winston on the head just like you do with Lyndon. You’re a little rough sometimes, but Winston has been so tolerant of you that it almost makes me forgive all his past hostilities.

You’re spending a lot of time talking, though I’m having a hard time trying to decipher it. You can mimic many sounds I make but won’t say anything on queue. Lately, you’ve been saying “Whee!” or maybe it’s “Oui!” I prefer to think it’s the latter, that you’re already fluent in French and Dad should whisk us off to Paris right away.

We’ve started taking you out in public more now that we can keep you entertained with toys. We’ve taken you out to eat a few times, and I’ve taken you to story time at the library. The interesting thing is that you already seem to have a public persona. When we’re around new people, you tend to be quieter and more serious. Everyone comments on your furrowed brow. You have that side at home, but you also have a boisterous side. You shriek as you race toward us on hands and knees. You dissolve into giggles as we tickle you. I know this is a lesson lost on a baby, but I do hope that someday you’ll love yourself as you are. Don’t feel that you have to dress a certain way or like a particular type of music or hold a certain belief so that others will like you. People are only worth having as friends if they like you for who you are. Dad and I couldn’t love anyone more than our cheese-hogging, furrowed-brow baby.

Love,

Mom

I had a dentist appointment yesterday, something that normally wouldn’t bother me much. I don’t usually mind going to the dentist because I have magical teeth. Yes, that’s right.

I am obsessed with dental hygiene. I’ll blame this on my parents because when I was a child they forced me to spend about 20 minutes daily brushing my teeth. They seemed to believe that good teeth were the key to happiness and success in life.

So I don’t have any fillings, and that didn’t seem like such a big deal when I was younger. Now that I”ve gotten older, I have kind of a competition going with myself. How long can I keep this up? Will I someday be 90 and still have these good teeth? Could I set a world record for teeth? (For those who don’t know, I have a seriously bizarre competitive streak.)

The hygienist yesterday didn’t know me, but she complimented my teeth right away. OK, clearly she knows magnificence when she sees it. We were off to a good start. Then she started to clean my teeth with the little plaque-scraper pokey thing.

“Your teeth are very clean on the front and back but not so much in between,” she said.

She stabbed at the supposed plaque. I think she wasn’t able to see the difference between plaque and gums because she was scraping away my gums. She didn’t have on glasses. I tried to look into her eyes to see if she had contacts because her vision seemed to be very bad.

She asked if I flossed often, and I told her I did. She said she would show me the proper way to floss. She put the floss in and then yanked it up into my brain. I think she knocked out a few of the cells holding the remnants of high school calculus.

“You need to make a C-motion like this,” she said.

Then she returned to her pokey tool, and OH. MY. GOSH. the blood. I may not look it, but I’m pretty tough. This was intolerable though. And there had been no mention of blood transfusions at the start of this. No forms of consent had been signed. What if I passed out? What if I died right there in the massaging dental chair? Not the worst way to go, but not what I had in mind either.

At the end, she told me the dentist was running behind and that I could wait if I wanted but that there wasn’t much point because my teeth looked great. Really? Do I have any teeth left in my mouth? I think you might have cut them out.

So for those of you who hate going to the dentist, I am truly sorry. Maybe I’ve been unsympathetic in the past, but now I understand.

Greg and I said goodbye to a dear friend last week, a sweet little car called the Low Rider.

She wasn’t glamorous by any stretch. My parents bought her during my freshman year of college. My brother was in high school, and this, this 1998 Toyota Camry, was not what any car-loving teenager wanted to drive. Could they have chosen anything more boring? A hearse, maybe?

The car had no pick-up. Oh, sure, it probably had 100-some-odd horsepower. But a horse is a powerful animal, and I don’t think it’s fair to associate it with this car. I think we were talking hamster power. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. New from Toyota: the 150 guinea-pig-power Camry.

But we made do. During my summer internships on the coasts, my parents lent the car to me. It became permanently mine during grad school.

Over the years, I started to see the beauty in the boring. Boring meant that the only maintenance the car ever required was an oil change. Boring meant that she started in the below-zero weather of Illinois and the 100-degree heat of Texas without complaint. That she carried me safely home from so many late nights at the newspaper.

The Low Rider joined me for my first summer really far from home — at an internship in Massachusetts. And then the following summer for an internship in Oregon. She carried Greg and I away from our reception on our wedding day. And carried our possessions to our first home. And carried still more possessions when we moved to Texas. And carried Eleanor the day we came home from the hospital. If it’s possible to love an object, I loved that car.

After 130,000 miles, the Low Rider and I parted ways. Greg and I had talked about getting a new car for a few years. I wanted tinted windows to shield Eleanor from the sun but didn’t want to spend money for them in the Low Rider. And I wanted better safety features.

I felt guilty test-driving new cars. And at the same time — wow, there have been some big improvements in cars during the past 12 years. I made my choice, a car with a lot of bells and whistles but no well-worn charm. I think her name is Millie, but I don’t know her yet. I hope she’ll be worthy of an ode someday.

I’m happy to say that the Low Rider has been passed on to some family members. We haven’t discussed visitation rights, but I have a feeling they’ll let me take her for a spin occasionally. I hope she’s as good to them as she was to me.