Congratulations on turning one year old today, Veda! When you get a little older, we can talk about the history of zero, which I guess you technically were up until now.

It’s kind of fascinating… The ancient Olmecs may have been the first to use your previous age, perhaps around 36 BCE, though it’s debatable whether the Babylonians had the basic idea down (after all, they did have a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, as we know, but they never used zero by itself or at the end of numbers, so there was no way to tell a small number from one many times its size; you had to go by context. This was one of a number of things that presumably sucked about Babylonian-ness.)

Did you know, Veda, that the Greeks used to argue over your age’s very existence? Zero just couldn’t quite be a number, they figured, and they are reported to have wondered aloud, “How can nothing be something?”

Well, now you’re something. For sure. You walk, and sort of talk, and even hold up your little index finger when we ask you how old you are.

(This is, I must admit, so cute I have to collapse on the floor and die every time you do it. We clap, and you clap, and everyone laughs and it’s wonderful.)

You’re getting so big so fast that I can’t seem to keep track of all your changes. I don’t really manage to scribble them all down here, and I wish I could. But I take lots of pictures, and write lots of little notes to myself. Let’s hope that there comes a time when it all makes sense, and I can speak knowledgeably, helpfully about it, and it isn’t just a mad torrent of growth and change and learning and frustration and boredom and chaos and wonderfulness. Let’s hope that’s soon.

I’ll be counting the days.

In the meantime, keep on rockin’, my one-year-old girl.