My daughter will be one year old next month.

These days, she keeps busy in her baby ways, throwing blueberries onto my hardwood floor from her high chair or ignoring all her toys in favor of a cupboard full of Tupperware or shrieking and clapping her hands and laughing at the dog. She has grown, 10 inches and 14 pounds and six teeth too. She has a head full of black hair and big dark eyes and long curly eyelashes that she inherited from her Dad.

I started waxing nostalgic last weekend, as I ordered invitations for Siobhan's first birthday bash. They're pink, if you wanted to know, with a cupcake motif and a picture of her on the day she was born ("Please put everything else back where you found it," I half-jokingly said to the surgeon, after she had been born via unplanned cesarean section.) and a picture of her a few weeks ago, solemnly regarding the camera and me.

Anyway, I remembered where we were a year ago -- me heavy and ponderous and hating having to even get out of bed in the morning and her twisting and kicking and waiting to be born. I have one of those eerie stories about my sixth sense, I guess you'd call it. Siobhan was born on a Sunday, the day I was exactly 36 weeks pregnant. I'd expected to go the full 40 -- actually, I'd expected to be late, being a first-timer with a family history of late (and huge!) babies. The Friday before, I'd finished the 11pm newscast and before I left the station for the weekend, decided to organize and clear my desk. "I should really just keep everything clear from here on out, " I thought to myself, "Just in case I don't come back. Just in case I start maternity leave."

Well, that Friday was the first time I'd bothered to think it or do it and sure enough, I did not return to the newsroom the next week.

Hard to believe that was eleven months ago. Where did the time go?