The backyard is filling up with leaves, the World Series is on its way, Shelby my coworker has already carved her pumpkin and its getting dark earlier and earlier. This can only mean another year is on its final lap. That last moment where we can all breathe right before Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa and New Years bum rush us and leave us all on our asses wondering where the hell it all went.

This is Keana’s second round of holidays already and the tradition solidification process is already well on its way. She continues to change on a seemingly hourly basis. For those of you who don’t have kids or have forgotten, she is almost a year and seven months now, and eats everything we eat, sans the processed foods and sugar of course. She can form crude sentences now like, “I hold you”, “Mama sleeping” and “Shoes on”. What’s really amazing is she’s starting to grasp what seem like really complex associations. For instance if someone stays over—as Grandma Linda and Grandpa Sam have recently—she asks the next morning, “Grandma here?”. Now just about every morning I get her up she asks about Grandma or Tia or if “Mama sleeping?”. Really fun and amazing.

Adorable, amazing and “smarter than I am even now” continue to inadequately describe little Miss Keana. The more and more she wants to do things on her own and try out new things, the more we realize that she is becoming the little person she was meant to be.