Chapter 21

Santana's POV

On my birthday, I woke up to breakfast in bed, which I guess had become a bit of a birthday tradition for us.

We chilled at home and video called our families, since I'd asked to not go anywhere on my birthday. The best part of the day was spending time with Everly. Her babbling had recently turned into her first word: Mama.

"Mama," Everly squealed, grinning widely. "Mamamamamama... Mami." Her second word.

I gasped, leaning down to pick her up. "That's right, I'm Mami." I couldn't stop smiling.

"Did you learn a new word for Mami's birthday?" Brittany asked, kissing Everly's forehead, unable to contain her smile.

"Mami!" she exclaimed again, seeing how happy her new word made us.

Of course Everly was going to eventually start calling me "Mami" since that was what Brittany called me in front of her, but it was still easily one of the happiest moments of my life, despite how simple it was.

"Santana!" I heard Brittany call when I opened the apartment door after getting home from work.

"Where are you?" I called back, taking off my work shoes and hanging my purse from the hook on the wall.

"The nursery!"

I hurried to the nursery.

"What is it?" I asked, then immediately saw Everly standing in the middle of the nursery, not holding onto anything.

"She took a step," Brittany said.

"Wow! That's so exciting, Everly!" I exclaimed, kneeling on the ground. "Can you come to Mami?"

She looked at me, keeping her balance, and taking a step before falling onto her diaper-padded butt.

"Great job, sweetheart!" I grinned widely as I picked her up into my lap.

"You missed her first step," Brittany said with a pout.

Looking up from the baby to smile at her, I replied, "I got to see her second step, though. I can't be here for everything, and I got to come home to this, so it's alright."

"Hey, B," I whispered just before midnight the night before our daughter's first birthday.

"Hey," she replied, instantly.

"I can't sleep. Can you believe that our daughter is almost a year old?"

"It's crazy," Brittany said, leaning in closer to me. "Is it bad that I'm a little sad about it?"

"I don't think so. I mean, I am too. I think we can be a little sad about our daughter growing up and happy about it too."

"It feels like she was born yesterday, and now she's walking and talking and... it's just a lot."

"Yeah, it is."

"Can we take a picture of her at the exact minute she was born?" Brittany asked.

"Of course."

So, when the sun just started to rise, we sneaked into our daughter's bedroom where she was sleeping in her crib to take a picture of her.

"We should probably start getting ready for the party," Brittany said after we left her nursery, "since we're awake anyway."

We started by tidying up the floors and cleaning the bathroom before eating some breakfast. When our daughter started mumbling to herself (which we heard over the baby monitor), Brittany went upstairs to breastfeed her and get her dressed. She wouldn't wear her party outfit yet, since we didn't want it to get dirty.

I went to the store to pick up the last few things we needed before heading home and starting to make her cake. We decided to make the cake from scratch since we wanted to customize it ourselves, decorating it the way we wanted to. We took a short break to play with our daughter.

"You know what today is, sweetheart?" I asked her, despite knowing that she had no idea why this day was so special.

"Mami," she babbled, saying one of her frequent words.

"It's your birthday!" I replied to my own question.

Brittany smiled from where she was starting to prepare some snacks from the kitchen, watching us.

"How about you and Mami come help me?" Brittany teased.

I picked up our fast-growing daughter and carried her to the kitchen where she "helped" Brittany prepare the food, which was mostly just her putting things in her mouth, or trying to, before we noticed.

After preparing for the party, Brittany and I brought her upstairs to get her ready for the party. She'd picked out her special dress herself while we were shopping for clothes for our constantly growing baby one day. We'd held her up by the dresses, and she'd grabbed the pinkest, and most sparkly, one there. While Brittany got the dress on her, I found her white tights, which were difficult to get on such a squirmy baby. Then, I put pigtails in her thin white-blonde hair. She was so adorable that of course we couldn't resist taking a lot of pictures on our phones.

We ate a small lunch, feeding our daughter some banana before guests started to arrive. Our apartment was small, so we'd invited very few people: our close families, Jessie, and Finn and Rachel and their two year old daughter, Grace, who we'd recently started spending a lot more time with.

I loved watching Finn and Rachel's daughter playing with Everly, even though they mostly just sat on the floor with her blocks, our daughter putting them in her mouth, which was her favorite thing to do.

After about two hours, we decided it was time for the cake to come out of the fridge. I carried our daughter over to her high chair and fastened her in. Brittany handed me the plastic birthday crown we'd found, and I put it on her head. She was so cute that even Finn was taking pictures of her.

Brittany and I lit the candle on the cake and brought it over to our daughter, singing "Happy Birthday" along with the rest of our guests. Brittany made sure that at least three people were recording the whole thing before we started with blowing out the candle.

"Okay, sweetheart," I said. "You want to blow out the candle?"

I showed her kind of what to do, purposefully avoiding the candle, and she tried, but all she did was spit on the cake. Despite how gross it was if you thought about it, I was too cute to be disgusted.

"Okay, let's try again," Brittany said, coming on the other side of our daughter. "Three, two, one..."

Everly spit on the cake again, while Brittany and I blew out the candle. Then, we cut a piece of the cake for her and put it on her high chair tray.

"You want to try it?" Brittany asked.

She looked unsure but soon her hands were covered in white and light pink icing and the cake, sticking them in her mouth only every so often. She seemed a lot more interested in painting her high chair tray than she did in eating her cake, but we didn't care. We took photos and spent time with our daughter, knowing that the day was perfect in its own way, just like every day with our beautiful daughter was.

Since a lot of our guests weren't coming from Columbus, we ordered in pizza for dinner. Brittany breastfed our daughter to relax her and settled her in the nursery for a nap, since she was severely over-stimulated and grumpy after all the commotion of her party.

We had asked our family to help us make a box for Everly to open on her eighteenth birthday with memories from her first year of life. Everyone we had invited had written notes for her and brought along items that they wanted to be in the box. Brittany and I had decided that we would only allow our guests to fill the box up half of the way, so that we could fill it up completely with the things that we had chosen.

Once everyone left, Brittany and I were so exhausted that we got ready for bed immediately. We couldn't wait to see what the next year of our daughter's life would bring.

A/N:

I'm finally back! I moved back into my bedroom a few days ago, and I should be able to keep posting a new chapter every week again, at least for a while.

Thanks so much for reading! I love to hear your thoughts, so leave a review if you'd like.

Also, I'd like to add in more Glee characters. Do you have any you'd like to see?