We sang "Happy Birthday" as the candle cried wax tears.

I could hardly contain my own.

Orli is 1. It’s a milestone I’ve been dreading practically from the minute she emerged, sweet-smelling and radiant like her name, “my light.”

The factory is closed, as my grandma used to say. No more babies. She’s it, the last one. And I want her babyhood to last forever.

Instead, it’s raced by as I’ve shuttled her brother and sister to preschool, put her down to nap, conducted interviews, written all of a paragraph before she’s awakened, zipped back for preschool pick-up, put her down for another nap, checked e-mail hastily, played Brown Bear, Panda Bear with the older kids, squeezed out another paragraph or two, put her to bed, done more work.

At her 9-month check-up, her pediatrician bade me farewell.

“I’ll see you at her 1-year-old visit,” he said cheerily.

I wasted no time setting him straight.

“Oh, we’re not coming to that,” I informed him, a little serious, a little not. “She’s not turning 1. We’ll just go directly to the 15-month appointment.”

In many ways, I’ve had so much more time with Orli than I did with her brother and sister. I went back to work part-time when each were a few months old. That was the plan with Orli too, but she wasn’t on board.

No bottles for her. No sippy cups either. No feeding tube attached to a syringe, per the doctor’s suggestion. Just mama.

I could have let her cry it out. She wouldn’t allow herself to starve, my mother assured me.

I couldn’t stand the thought. So I accommodated her (isn’t that so much of what mothers do?), rearranging my schedule to work from home.

As a result, she’s never known a nanny, never gone longer than five or six hours without seeing me.

As a result, we’re pretty tight, Orli and me. If I’m in the house, she wants to be in my arms.

It makes it a little hard to get things done.

Out of necessity, I’ve greatly expanded the realm of activities that can be accomplished one-handed.

Chopping vegetables? Not a problem.

Going to the bathroom? A little trickier, but still doable.

As she (inevitably) grows up, I fear I’ll forget the extent of her lusciousness.

With all the chaos of everyday life, I haven’t had time to update her journal, to capture in exacting detail her jack-o-lantern grin, her breathy “hi” when I enter her room in the morning, how she initiates peek-a-boo and smushes her face against the glass pane of the door to make us laugh, her vocal talent and enviable gross motor skills -- she claps! -- as she sings along with the “la la la la” hook on that catchy “New Soul” ditty that Apple used in an ad for its MacBook Air laptop.

She’s a special baby. She’s already contributed to society in so many deeply meaningful ways, and she doesn’t even know it.

By the third time around, it was hardly a surprise that I knew what to expect, pregnancy-wise. With my enhanced comfort level, I did some things I hadn’t done with my first two babies.

I pumped extra breast milk for premies who need it and whose moms can’t produce it. I enrolled in a UNC-Chapel Hill study of fetal blood flow that required monthly ultrasounds. (To be sure, there was a perk: I learned the ultrasounds were three-dimensional rather than the standard two-dimensional sonograms that yield images that more closely approximate big eye-socketed aliens than babies.) We watched her tumble inside me in real-time, getting to know her quirks and habits months before she was born. She always had her tongue sticking out of her mouth, a la Michael Jordan. After she was born, little changed.

And at her birth, a technician was on hand to harvest her umbilical cord blood, which is stored at the not-for-profit Carolinas Cord Blood Bank at Duke University for use in unrelated donor blood and marrow transplants. She’s just a year old, but she could potentially change someone’s life.

In the meantime, she’s changed mine.

Bonnie appears every Monday on TriangleMom2Mom.