30 years ago – September 1990

30 years ago – in September 1990 – my daughter passed her 1-year mark and a few weeks later started to walk rather than cruise. The transition from taking few steps/walking while holding onto something to walking all the time happened on a single day and we took lots of pictures. She even started carrying things in her hands on that day (her favorite being a blanket). She also figured out a way to get on our bed without help – by using the foot board as a step up and then a leg up and over. She might have been motivated by the books that were in the headboard since the first thing she did once she was on the bed was to pull them all out to look at. The cat patiently supervised.

She was speaking in single words…mostly people or food. A day or so after she started walking, she kept repeating ‘book’ as we came into the house from her day care….and she insisted on going up to her bedroom….where she immediately went to the stack of books we had by our rocking chair and pulled out the book she wanted….sat down to look at it. She must have been thinking about it as we drove home.

I had been gradually increasing my work hours during the month and had my full-time assignment that would start October 1. I was making plans for some family travel over Thanksgiving…but concerned that my new assignment had the potential to be in crunch mode at the same time. I was trying to not get too anxious but had not quite acclimated to the mom and career duality. The ‘Sally Forth’ comic strip was becoming my role model of the type relationship my daughter and I would have as she got older….maybe.  

My husband was being supportive…helping more with our daughter and setting up an office for me. This was the time that we went from 1 home computer to 2. I had the best room in the house for my office (a view of our front yard trees from the window).

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Haze at 30,000 feet. We are having hazy skies in Maryland from smoke created by the fires in California! Evidently the jet stream is carrying the smoke across the northern part of the US. By the time it gets here, it is a thin layer and high enough to not cause air quality issues. We can tell it’s a sunny day because there are shadows on our yard…but the sky is not blue.