Happy New Year.

Last night, after a rollicking New Year's Eve of toddler mayhem, I was checking in on Reese before I went to bed and she was sound asleep. I went in to give her my usual kiss on the forehead and she opened her eyes and looked straight into mine as though she had just been in a play pretending to be a girl asleep.

"Hi, Mama. Watch this."

She proceeded to put her index finger square in the middle of her bottom lip.

"OK," I say,"what's that?"

"That's it," she says proudly, as though what she had done actually qualified as an actual something.

Then:

"Mama, will you come back and kiss me goodnight?"

"Of course, sweetheart."

"Always you do?"

"Always I do."

My first promise of the year: kept.