But what I didn’t expect was to say, 14 months later, “I didn’t know someone could love me this much.” Somehow, in all that time I longed for a child to love, even in all this time I’ve had one, it didn’t occur to me that I would be the center of her universe, too.

Even during our 10 months of breastfeeding, when Ruby got Mama-clingy, I’d wryly say, “She wants the lunch truck again.” Somehow I mostly convinced myself (in part to spare others’ feelings, I think) that Ruby only wanted to be with me because I was her primary source of food. Certainly, that was a factor, especially when she was very young.

But now that she’s almost 15 months old, she’s gotten very adept at communicating her wants and needs, and I’ve realized that I am often what she wants and needs. Not what I have to give her – food, book-reading, pressing the button on the ball popper – just me. My attention, my affection.

Nothing pleases her more than if I sit on the couch instead of at my desk. She’ll climb up beside me, preferably in the little nook between me and the end of the couch, and just sit happily there, petting my arm. I’ve figured out that she only starts acting naughty – pressing the buttons on the DVR, pulling out my work papers – if she wants me to hold her and talk to her a little while. When we’re at the grocery store, she’ll only ride in the cart if I stay directly in front of her at all times, preferably singing “Victor Vito.”

If we’re with family and people reach for her, she holds on tight to me like a monkey (at least until she warms up). If Daddy tries to get her to follow him to the kitchen, she’ll hover in the doorway to the living room, looking back at me, until I get up to come with them. If D is holding her, she’ll cry and wriggle toward me every time I come near (especially if she’s getting tired). At bedtime, she again clings to me like a monkey and won’t even so much as let Daddy kiss her goodnight because she’s afraid he’ll take her from me. She wants me to be the one to put her to bed, and I finally gave in and took over doing it most nights, because when D tried, it took forever and lots of screaming. Then, if she wakes up in the night, it does no good for D to go in to soothe her; only Mama will do.

This is not to say she doesn’t love other people, because she does. She adores her daddy (clings to him plenty, too, and cries if he tries to put her back down too soon after he gets home from work), and loves her grandparents, Aunt Kelly, and all her other aunts, uncles and cousins. She smiles at strangers, too, and wanders up to random girls at Barnes and Noble to look at their toenail polish.

And sometimes she couldn’t care less about me, like when I drop her off to stay with my parents. Every time, she ignores my goodbyes because Pop is holding her and she wants him to take her outside. (In fact, “outside” trumps Mama nearly every time.)

Most of the time, though, it’s utterly clear I’m numero uno. And there’s a lot of responsibility at the top. After a long day of just me and Ruby, I’m ready to hand her off to Daddy for a while, but she still brings me books to read or tries to climb in my lap while I’m trying to get some work done. Even if I sometimes get a little tired of her touching me, she never seems the least bit tired of me touching her.

Still, I don’t mind too much always being the go-to parent. I’m acutely aware this Mama’s girl behavior may be a phase, and even if it isn’t, it will likely end with a bang at puberty.

Either way, it’s fleeting, and like all fleeting things, so very precious. When I say, “Mama loves you, Punky. Do you love Mama?” she lays her head down on my shoulder and squeezes me with both arms. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

My goal was to finish my novel (set in Alabama during the Civil War) by my 30th birthday. I am proud to say I met that goal with two hours to spare! (My other goal, to lose all my pre-pregnancy weight by my birthday, was not entirely successful, but I was only 4 pounds away at the time and now 3 pounds away … not too bad.)

I got the idea for the novel three years ago after I quit my 9 to 5 job to work from home. Somehow, I stumbled across an obscure historical incident that was really interesting and decided if I tweaked it a bit it would make a good story. I wrote an outline and 15,000 words or so.

Then what always happens to me when I try to to write historical fiction happened. I got bogged down in the research. I wanted everything to be as accurate as possible, as close to the truth as possible, and I froze.

Another major factor in my procrastination: this coincided with the time when we decided to adopt a child. I focused my energy on doing research for that, preparing our profiles, getting the house ready for the home study. Oh yeah, and obsessing and worrying myself to a frazzle every second of the day and night. That kind of thing takes up a lot of time.

Then this spring after the April 27 tornado, I reconnected on facebook with two of my closest college friends, who moved to California years ago to get in the movie biz. Turned out the two of them are still friends and also writing partners. They’d written a young adult novel (and were working on the sequel), and they had an agent. They were looking for beta readers for their current work, so I eagerly signed up and threw myself into it with gusto. I hadn’t realized I missed editing until I was doing it again. For other people, editing probably sounds like torture. For me, it is like bliss.

I recently took a Meyer Brigg personality quiz and determined I am an INTJ, which really, really values logic and problem-solving. I think that’s the reason editing is so appealing to me. Whenever I rapturously describe the joy of editing (while my audience’s eyes glaze over), I always say it’s like a puzzle, and you’re trying to find the perfect word and order to make it fit together.

Anyway, while happily working on my friends’ books, I admit I also felt jealous. My dream since childhood was to write books (literally, I thought I was going to be like S.E. Hinton, the author of The Outsiders, and write a book by the time I was 16), and I wasn’t doing anything to make it happen. But they were. One of these friends and I had been Creative Writing minors together, had classes together, were on the staff of the Marr’s Field Journal together; we were of similar talent, and here she was doing what she’d dreamed, and I wasn’t.

It lit a fire under me. I buzzed back to my chock-full “Writing” file on my desktop … chock full of half-finished stories and novels and half-formed ideas, that is. The first one I revisited was this story about a prisoner of war camp in Alabama and the women who helped make it bearable, because it had been the best formed and felt to me like it had the best potential.

I started working. I stayed up late after Ruby went to bed, writing like a fiend. I wrote while she was at Granny’s, I wrote between working on adding products to the website. I formatted the manuscript for my Kindle and took one of my old reporter’s notebooks on vacation to the beach and jotted notes, because I couldn’t stand to be away from my book for that many days.

I did research as I went along, but I tried not to get bogged down in making everything perfectly, exactly like the past. The first-person accounts of that time and place (and there are many) all differed slightly, and I realized the truth itself was elusive.

I sought advice and support from my friends, who had done it, actually finished their book and polished it and found an agent. They said, “This is the first draft. Just keep writing. Just get it down.”

And I did. The book grew and grew, sometimes in 500-word sputters, other times in 7,000-word bursts. It got big enough that knew I would finish this time. I set the goal of finishing by my birthday.

The night before I turned 30, I had only a couple of pages left to write. D and Ruby went to bed, and I stayed up alone to nail down the final paragraphs in the blissful silence of the dark house. The words flowed easily because I already knew what would happen. And then I was done with my first draft. I’d gone from 15,000 words to 106,764 in just over two months, and I went to bed glowing with the pride of accomplishment.

Of course, a first draft is only that. There is much editing to do (my favorite part!), and then I’ll send it, with equal parts terror and eagerness, to my own beta readers to get their opinions on whether my time has been well spent.

It’s so hard to get distance from my own work that I am at least half-convinced it’s terrible and will never be published. But there’s that other half that says, “Edit, edit, edit. Of course, it’s terrible now. But it won’t be.” That half is holding out hope that one day I might see a book, this book, on a shelf with my name on the cover.

So wish me luck. I said I was going to wait a couple of weeks to start editing, but I only made it three days. Let the puzzle-solving commence!

I was stunned at first – literally, mouth-hanging-open stunned – but taken in the context of the past two weeks, it isn’t so surprising. My baby girl is a year old now, a toddler, a big girl. It’s been a year of whirlwind change, spinning faster than I ever thought it could, but lately it seems even more accelerated. Every day she does some funny new thing (or not so funny when Mama is tired).

So, so quickly she went from toddling a few wobbly steps between us to careening around the house, stepping blithely over thresholds, toys and pets. Where she used to hang onto your fingers so tight they turned white, now she lets go and takes off in her own direction – usually toward the stairs or the dog food bowl.

Today I trailed behind her around the house for a long time, soaking in all the adorable things she’s doing now, knowing how fleeting they are. Like when she tried to get to a standing position while holding a jar of baby food in each hand, concluded it wouldn’t work, then looked from one to the other of them, made a decision which would go, and flung it away. She doesn’t set anything down anymore; everything is chucked down like it’s hot to the touch. That won’t last.

Nor will the way she opened a kitchen cabinet today for the first time, leaned over to look inside, shut it back, and moved on to the next cabinet. Or the way she talks to herself while she’s playing. She has abandoned most of the words she rapidly acquired, replacing them instead with constant cheerful chatter in a babbling language all her own. The only words she’s retained are “mama” (which she also uses to mean “paci”), “dada” and her favorite, “book.”

When she shows me her wicked little grin, I see her five front teeth (she has two more molars in the back), and I both fear and delight in how the new ones will change her smile. Already, she asserts her independence with the toothbrush, yanking it from my hand and “brushing” her teeth herself (and mine, because “teeth” are her favorite body part to point to).

I knew this child would be independent, but I didn’t realize it would be so soon. My girl, who for months wouldn’t let me put her down to do so much as a load of laundry, now tries to buck and slide her way down to the floor to walk at every opportunity. Once the car seat is unbuckled, she wants to wiggle free and climb into your arms herself. She still eats baby food in a pinch but vastly prefers things she can stuff in her mouth herself – mandarin oranges, green beans, carrots, grapes, strawberries, chicken, pasta, broccoli, and string cheese, oh how she loves the string cheese.

(She also now likes to offer people her food, or her paci, or the strip from the top of the yogurt melts bag that she’s been waving around, and she thinks it’s hilarious when I make a growly “yum yum yum” noise and pretend to eat the soggy, half-chewed cracker in her hand.)

After these past two weeks, I know age is not just a number. I’d thought the clock would roll over from 11 months to ONE YEAR OLD without much ado, but I was wrong. The girl walking all over the place at her own birthday party, not a bit afraid to be one tiny person among the legs of 40 big people, that girl was no infant anymore.

And tonight, she fell asleep without holding Mama’s hand.

Ruby 0-6 Months | Ruby 6-12 Months

The tornadoes hit south of here and east of here. The worst damage we got was a few hundred magnolia leaves strewn about the yard. A house three doors down had a giant tree fall on its porch in the morning storm, but the evening storms missed us entirely here. We feel incredibly lucky.

Still, Tuscaloosa was my town for many years. I lived there longer than I’ve lived anywhere. My family still lives there, and so does D’s. My family’s business is there (missed by a half-mile). Our hairdressers and dentists and doctors are there. The places we shop, the places we eat.

And many of those are gone. My hair stylist’s new salon, her dream, that she’d just got exactly perfect? Gone – wiped from the map. The restaurant D and I ate at weekly during our first year of marriage – also gone. The Hobby Lobby where I bought Ruby’s baby book – severely damaged. The Sherwin-Williams paint store where I bought the paint for our dining room – nothing but a slab now. The Taco Casa where I bought many an extra hot bean burrito with extra cheese during my pregnancy – damaged but still standing.

That strip of town – that enormous strip of town – is unrecognizable. I stayed out of the way for several days, looking at endless photos online of the damage – until things cleared up some. Then I went to volunteer one day, sorting clothes and toiletries, delivering meals to people still trying to live in their damaged homes with no power. I saw trees ripped out of the ground, houses knocked off their foundations. It’s a cliche, but true, that it looked like a bomb went off. I’ve lived in this town for half my life, traveled all over it, and I was disoriented. Nothing looked the same.

So yes, we feel lucky. There are 41 dead in this town alone, among them many babies and young children. It makes me physically sick to think of all the mothers without their babies now, and all the children without their mothers. I would’ve felt terrible about that before, but now, knowing the intense, unshakeable, never-ending love I have for my child, I am devastated to think there are people out there knowing the unspeakable reality of losing a child.

That morning, in the first wave of storms, I woke up to the windows shaking from the near-constant thunder and lightning. Ruby, miraculously, was still asleep in her crib. I didn’t want to wake her. I told myself it was just another thunderstorm. Go back to sleep.

But I lay awake, debating. I wanted her close to me. I tiptoed into her room to make sure she was breathing, but I didn’t wake her.

When she woke minutes later from a particularly loud thunderclap, I was relieved and went to get her. I put her in bed with me, and she nestled against me as she still likes to do, holding my hand, and went back to sleep. I didn’t take us into the closet under the stairs, the safe place, because I didn’t want to scare her or get her too awake. It was just another thunderstorm. We have them all the time.

Next morning, I found out there was a tornado not a half-mile down the road. What if it had veered toward us? What if it had been a little stronger? And the deadly tornadoes of that night came within 30 miles of us on two sides.

All I can say is next time, we’ll go get in the closet.

For those who may be wondering if these reminisces mean we are getting that house and starting a new adventure/spiraling downward into insanity, the answer is we’re not sure. We took our expert renovator friends with us for another look-see this weekend, and with their help, we noticed a lot more wrong with the place than was initially obvious.

We investigated the cause of water damage in the kitchen ceiling and – guess what? – it’s not an old leak from a water heater, as it appeared at first glance, but a possibly ongoing roof leak. There’s also a 4-inch, gnawed-edge hole in the gold bedroom’s floor hidden under a rug; the balcony is sagging away from the house; there’s at least one instance of termite damage and several areas of rotted wood on the exterior.; the nails are backing out of the siding on one side of the house; the windows in the sun room are storm windows; much of the upstairs appears to still be running on knob and tube wiring; there’s another, smaller roof leak in the green upstairs bedroom; and the upstairs bathroom floor under the vinyl is a mystery of lumps and mush. And that’s all without even looking under the house.

If all of this sounds really scary, that’s because it is. We’ve never done a house that needs this much work. I was hoping we could hire some guys to fix the rotting wood that’s making the porch sag, throw a little more money at some other minor wood rot, and handle the kitchen and bathrooms ourselves. If we could fix up the whole thing for 25K or so, we’d still have a very inexpensive house that we could either move to or sell, depending on what we decided at a later date.

Now we’re looking at rewiring, roof replacement, possible window replacement in that back room, and LOTS of exterior issues. So basically, it’s a way bigger project than we anticipated, with a way bigger budget.

Our friends, the renovator couple, seemed to have opposite opinions on it. The husband told D, “If you don’t get this house, consider it dodging a bullet.” Yikes. Listening to him pointing out flaw after flaw, I started getting freaked. Meanwhile, the wife – obviously the “me” of this pair – was upbeat about the project, saying stuff like – “Oh, you just hire a couple of guys for a day and they can knock that out. It would only cost $1,000, $2,000 at the most.” (referring to the porch-jacking-and-de-rottifying).

The definite conclusion agreed on by all: There’s no way this is a fix-and-flip. With all the work and expense it would require – I’d guess in the neighborhood of at least 50K, depending on a lot of factors, and without a full kitchen redo – making any bonus money on the sale would be too iffy.

Still, if we just wanted to live there, we’d have a reasonably priced (and fully awesome) residence when we got finished, even if we blew the budget on it.

So basically it comes down to what we want. Do we want to move to Greensboro (I admit, the appeal of Pie Lab is strong)? Do we want to dedicate our free time and money to this house for a couple of years? Do we even have enough free time and money?

On the way home that afternoon, my sister, who had come along to see the house and eat pie with us, said, “So what are the reasons to get the house?” and all I could come up with was, “It’s awesome.” By the time we got home, we’d pretty much concluded the dream was dead.

But since then, every couple of hours, someone says, “I just wish … ” or “Well, I guess we could … ” Or “What if we … ”

So the dream is in ICU, but it’s not dead. We have more thinking to do, more talking, more researching. And probably more trips to Greensboro, to linger on those front steps, peeking in at the woodwork.

On the way there, I kept up an eager stream of chatter: “We can’t decide anything without a thorough look – we don’t even know what the kitchen and bathrooms are like. It’s one thing if the outside needs work, but if the kitchen and bathrooms have to be completely redone, well, that’s a whole different thing. We have to remember – don’t let me forget to ask how far back the property goes. And we should ask him how much it would sell for if it was fixed up. And how old it is – the website didn’t say. Oh, and the square footage, too. The website didn’t say that either.”

We got to the house a few minutes early for our appointment and sat in the car in the back yard, noticing more rotting boards and the enormous metal wheel chair ramp and the junglicious yard, complete with an overgrown fig tree just like ours at home.

The realtor, a very charming Southern gentleman with a penchant for fedoras, showed us in the front door, and there began the season of turmoil I’m in the midst of now. The house was every bit as beautiful as I’d imagined it would be from the glimpse through the windows, if not more so. Yet it was also in worse shape than I imagined.

First, the good. I already rhapsodized about the interior woodwork, and yes, it is amazing and in absolutely perfect shape. There are also several antique light fixtures, two stained glass windows, a large clawfoot tub, ornate metal fireplace covers, beautiful mantels, enormous working windows with nary a crack in the glass, Eastlake carved front doors, a big yard with a camellia (my favorite), exquisite exterior details, five enormous bedrooms, 12-foot ceilings at least, maybe 14, two staircases, and room to carve out a walk-in closet from an attic nook.

There is a charming area in the back hall with a built-in desk and bookshelves lining the walls, where I could see myself working while the kids played in the adjacent sitting room.

There is a window seat in a nook in the blue bedroom upstairs – not even a big enough or very pretty window seat, but just the sight of it, something I’ve always wanted, made me feel like Anne Shirley seeing her room at Green Gables for the first time.

But then there is the bad. The rotting wood on the front porch and a few other spots, including where a water heater upstairs leaked down through the back hall and kitchen’s beadboard ceiling. A large-but-grim kitchen every bit as 1970s as the one we fixed up here, except bigger and crustier, with more cabinets to have to paint or tear out or something. A dimly lit half bathroom so tiny I could barely wedge myself around the door. A functioning but unattractive full bath downstairs, and a half-finished reno on the upstairs bath. A sitting room on the back that was added in the 70s and looks it.

Also, there are a few things that aren’t really wrong with the house but just compare unfavorably to ours. Mostly the glaring lack of a carport or other outbuildings, the lack of central heat/air (it’s only in the back part where the sitting room and kitchen are), my knowledge that this enormous house would be even harder than ours to keep appropriately cool/warm – not to mention clean. The fact that our yard is very private, and this one has a church looming over the side of the yard.

Still, even as I was writing those cons, my mind kept adding “but” after each one. The half bath is tiny, but all we’d have to do is switch the door to open outward instead of inward, and it wouldn’t be a problem. The other bathroom is ugly, but all it really needs is paint and a prettier floor. The kitchen is kind of awful, but it has a gigantic oven, so there would be space for a restored antique gas stove like I’ve been daydreaming about since 2004. There’s no carport, but (and D supplied this one on our way home, with some excitement) we could build a three-car carport for his multitude of vehicles with an adjoining enclosed area for him to work on stuff. The yard isn’t as private, but church is only in session a couple of hours a week.

All these things keep swirling around in my mind. One minute something that seems like a pro – big, pretty windows let in lots of light – the next seems like a con – big, drafty windows let in lots of cold. I weigh the 10-minutes-longer commute for D against the fact that Greensboro has a somewhat better school for Ruby (and only 12 blocks away). I convince myself I want the Greensboro house, can’t bear to let it pass me by, and then the next moment, I open a door in my own house and appreciate the utter familiarity of it, the way I know its every corner, even in the dark, and the thought of leaving it makes me queasy.

Last night in bed, I told D what I’ve been thinking is about that blue room, about that window seat, and about the comfortable sitting room and the bookshelves, and when I think about those things, I believe it is my dream house. I believe I would never glance sideways at another house if it were mine because there could be nothing better. We could buy it and work on the outside stuff first to get it sound, and then gradually work on the interior until we were ready to move, maybe when it was time for Ruby to start school. We could make it exactly what we wanted it to be.

And if, in that time frame, we changed our minds and wanted to stay here, or move somewhere else, we could sell it.

I was pretty set on that plan last night, but now today I like my house. I’m used to it. It’s closer to our families. The front porch is so pretty and private and shady. We have friends here in Eutaw.

Though we could make them in Greensboro … and they have an opera house! And a restaurant devoted exclusively to pie! And I lay awake 30 minutes last night buzzing with the excitement of planning a renovation again.

So you see what I mean. Turmoil.