Although I’ve never quite grasped the physics of it, some very intelligent people have declared that time is relative. And I think they are onto something.
To me, it feels like a month, maybe two at most have passed since the arrival of our son. There is, however, some pretty compelling evidence that it has in fact been well over a year. This evidence is, of course, my son himself. At some point – I am guessing it was a Tuesday afternoon – he doubled in size, started walking, sprouted teeth, and mastered iOS8.
This was unfortunate news for us, his parents, as we were just starting to feel confident in our ability to take care of a baby. Now, we no longer have a baby. We have a toddler. What I am trying to say is that, when it was just my wife and I, we were two adults aging gradually enough that it was hard to notice a change year to year, let alone month to month.
Sure, my waistline has been expanded faster than the Russian border with the Ukraine, but that is at least a predictable rate of expansion. With a child as part of our lives, it seems like time is jerking backwards and forwards, much like the PVR does when he gets a hold of the remote.
My son is now over one year old. From now on, we can refer to his age in years rather than just months, although I notice a lot of parents hold onto the months (“he’s 16 months”) perhaps thinking that they can slow down the calendar that way or just not ready to admit that the leap between one year and two or three or sixteen seems a lot smaller than it did at eleven months. I’ve decided to take the opposite approach and start relatively aging myself at my son's rate, so I should be going through a midlife crisis sometime next week and starting to perfect my shuffle table and bridge game for retirement at Christmas 2018.
My thinly veiled fear of mortality aside, the last year and change has been as intense and rewarding as any I can remember. I imagine veteran parents chuckling to themselves as my wife and I struggle to express how incredibly weird and satisfying it is watching a baby go from a 7 pound mass of need and bowel movements to a 20 pound mass of need and bowel movements that also walks.
Parenting is full of milestones besides bowel movements, but it is always the bowel movements that we seem to track most carefully. That said, we did break out in applause when he mastered sitting up and I thought we would be receiving parent of the year awards as he learned to stand on his own.
We have videos and photos (so many photos) of all these important milestones from the first haircut to the first time crawling up the stairs. It is without shame - because really, what shame do I have left? - that I admit we are borderline stalkers when it comes to parenting. My son will never wonder about his childhood because he'll be able to search the metadata in the shared photo library and watch a minute by minute slideshow set to "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
One of the highlights in that photo library will be his first birthday. By a conservative estimate, we put the same amount of time into planning and preparing for his birthday as went into the completion of the Panama Canal. Like many parents, my favorite part of his birthday was the twelve hours of sleep that immediately followed it.
That's not to say it wasn't worth it. We did get a great picture -which we will digitally alter for the next five years to give us time to recover enough to plan another birthday party for him.
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