Since the day we brought him home, Joe has mostly slept in one-piece footie pajamas. You know, for babies.

Now our big boy is in two-piece jammies. So we get to see more of his sweet feet!

We had a lovely family trip to Pittsburgh last weekend, where we saw a specialist at Children’s Hospital about Joe’s eyes. He said that the glasses are doing great things for Joe’s vision, which should improve even more over time. Yay!

Here he is, waiting patiently for the Carnegie museums to open:

Joe and I took a little drive to South Carolina to visit my old friend Krisie and her daughter, Lizzy. Lizzy was born a few weeks after Joe, and we can’t believe it’s taken us more than a year to get these two together.

Krisie was my bar manager when I bartended back in the late 90s. There was a time when 7 p.m. on a Friday night would have found us knee-deep in drink orders and yelling for someone to change the keg. But on this Friday night at 7 p.m., we were elbow deep in bathwater, scrubbing our babies down before putting them to bed.

Funny how things change!

Lizzy and Joe got along famously and even slept in the same room. Here they are enjoying a dip in the pool:

And here is Joe, finding out how much fun Krisie is:

This weekend, we’ll have another road trip — but this time Daddy gets to come along. More on that later!

When Joe gets really tired, the silliest things become hysterically funny to him. His laughter can quickly turn to tears when he gets like that, so you have to be careful. But man, is it fun!

Here he is after dinner, finding that it’s a laugh riot when we talk through a paper-towel tube:

Joe makes friends wherever he goes, and people (especially kids) always say he looks like someone famous.

Here are the comparisons we hear most:

I think Patrick picked the best one, back when Joe first got glasses. Egghead, from the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons:

Speaking of cartoon characters with glasses, I was surprised to open the paper a few weeks ago and see Linus from Peanuts sporting a pair of specs. I looked it up, and it turns out Charles Schulz had Linus in glasses for part of 1962. After a few months, he removed them again.

He’s still no giant, but it’s hard to believe Joe was ever this small:

We used to take him out on that porch swing at night to get him calmed down for sleep. Just 365 days later, he’s so good at sleeping, he can do it while eating breakfast:

In other news, he’s working on saying “Mama” when I ask him to. He said it once, spontaneously, right around Mothers Day. But since then, not much. In the past couple of days, he has said it back to me as “Baw Baw.” Good enough!

(Of course, he says “Dada” all day long.)

I just love it when Joe gets really tickled at something and can’t stop laughing.

The look on his face here is identical to the look on mine when Patrick and I came out of the chapel on our wedding day:

Pure joy!

Joe is enjoying being a 1-year-old. He looks less like a baby and more like a little boy every day. I’m so eager to see what 3-year-old Joe is like, or 10-year-old Joe, or (yikes) teenage Joe. At the same time, I want him to stay little and snuggly for as long as possible.

The last thing Patrick and I do before going to bed is tiptoe into Joe’s room and look at him for a minute. I imagine we’ll always be tempted to do that. Will he be home from college one weekend, and open his eyes at 1 a.m. to see us smiling sappily down at him?

Our boy is ONE YEAR OLD.

One of my fellow Richmond Mommies is a really talented photographer and is running a little “Father and Child” contest on her blog. The prize is a photo session for the family, and I really want one to commemorate Joe’s first birthday!

So please, if you have a moment, go to her blog and vote for Number 18. (If you want to check out the competition, here they are.)

When I took this photo, Joe was all, “Mooommmm, don’t blog a picture of me in my UNDERWEAR!”

Then I showed it to him and he said, “OK, that is pretty cute.”

Go ahead, hear it for yourself!