Counting to One

Today Smiley will have his first birthday party. It's a little early, so it will happen on a weekend day with sunshine and warm weather.

Strawberries are one of the foods that pediatricians suggest delaying until one year of age. So his birthday food treat will be strawberries and cream.

My wife also baked a yogurt cake for the adults. Since it has eggs, Smiley cannot have any.

Lately I have been enjoying thinking about numerical facts about what has happened during the last year...

• We've lost two of his socks (he pulls them off while on walks behind me in the Ergo, and I do not always notice). So he has one pair that is mismatched, tan-and-gray, and still looks cute on him.

• We have lost zero pacifiers permanently. There were a few occasions in the middle of the night where we could not find the one he fell asleep with, but that's why we keep two in the nursery.

• We took 4,022 photographs of him, of which 385 were nice enough to upload to Picasa. (I still have 132 to process.)
  

• We took 764 Flip videos of him, of which 279 were nice enough to upload to BlipTV. (I still have 96 to process.)

• We clipped his nails only seven times. (For the first eight months it was not necessary to use the nail clipper since infant nails are so soft that normal play keeps them short.)

• Parents are supposed to keep track of a newborn's eating, sleeping, and pooping on a chart, to provide doctors with that information in case growth is too slow. My wife wanted us to keep using these charts to help her monitor his nursing and her milk supply. So we have not added up the data, but for his first year we have a paper record of every time food went in or out of him, how much he drank, when he slept, how much milk my wife produced, and how many times he threw up.

• We only used slightly more than one gallon-size container of laundry detergent, despite doing a load of his laundry most days in addition to our other laundry. I was initially unsure how significant that expense would be; it's quite minor.

• He used up one bottle of infant Tylenol (when he was teething) and just over one bottle of infant probiotic powder.

• The stuffed animals he wound up with most of were turtles (2), frogs (2), and otters (4, but they are identical).
  

If I think of more numerical curiosities, I'll add them later.