The Best Year

I can't believe it's been a whole year since I welcomed this lovely little lady into my life:

It's been an incredibly quick year,

But I can't shake the feeling that it's the only year of my life.

Did I live before she looked at me with those big beautiful eyes?

What did I do before there were sweet (albeit disgustingly slobbery) baby kisses to look forward to?

Somewhere in my head, smushed behind my knowledge of VeggieTales and the correct dosage of infant tylenol, there are memories of a girl who traveled, who read dozens of books on a Caribbean beach, who lived in a NYC high-rise and took two trains to work, but that person who put on Kings Of Leon and painted with wanton disregard of passing time and the amount of chemicals being inhaled, pretty much only shares my fingerprints (although I did a pretty good job of burning those off in a restaurant a few years ago). I can't imagine living in a world where my laundry doesn't smell like baby detergent, where there aren't mysterious snacks abandoned in random locales all over the house (a cookie in the bath tub?), where nobody laughs hysterically when I throw the sheets up like a parachute over head. I went a lot of places and did a lot of very important stuff in the first 25 years of my life but the last one is the only one I lived.