Nine Months

When I hold him and run my fingertips along the buttery skin of his cheeks, I wonder if I’ll remember this. This exact moment.

Will I remember what his flawless baby skin felt like when I stare into the face of the man he’ll become one day? When I look into that man’s face, will I still see the baby whose chubby, neck-less body I used to kiss? It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. He’s noticeably growing daily, but I’m not sure how it happens. Does it happen as he sleeps, his body elongating, his facial features becoming sharper and more prominent?

Everyone tells you this first year goes so quickly and it does. Even in those foggy newborn moments, I remember circling and tracing his hands and feet in my mind, as if that alone would help me remember how small they once were. Every day, I took a mental inventory: the exact pitch of his cry, the circumference of his tiny head, the shape of his fleshy ears. But, still, even with all the photos taken almost hourly on my phone as proof over these past nine months, I’m already forgetting.

He’s obviously the same baby, but he’s a different baby too. There are things he doesn’t do anymore. He doesn’t spit up (thankfully), he doesn’t cry for me the second he sees me enter the room like he used to. He’s content playing by himself. He’s less clingy and needy, heading more and more toward independence. He stands alone on his legs for long chunks of time, without a surface to hold onto. He’s not walking yet, but pushing closer to that milestone. He feeds himself everything the rest of the family is eating, with a deft pincer grasp to boot.

When I stare at his perfect baby face as he drifts off to sleep in my arms at night, I struggle to imagine the man. What will that man look like? What will his voice sound like? What will give him joy in life? The uncertainty of it all is exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time. It’s all a mystery and I want to both slow down the process in getting there and speed it up, so I can meet that man and make sure he’s okay, to know that life is mostly good to him and that he’s as happy as he once was as a nine-month-old baby, the one who came along at exactly the right time in our lives, the one with an easy smile and a contagious belly laugh that made everyone in the room laugh right along with him.

Happy Nine Months, Baby Boy.

Eight Months

He turned eight months last week, my sweet baby boy.

He’s as cool and as calm as they come, just as he was the day he slid into this world, his eyes wide open, blinking assuredly as if he’d been here before. I’m pretty sure he had.

He was my easiest labor and delivery and he’s without a doubt my easiest baby. He wakes up every morning smiling with his entire body. For the most part, he sleeps soundly and for long stretches at a time.

He loves food: turkey sausage, watermelon, strawberries, cheese, broccoli, rice, pasta, beans — he wants it all — and we’ve broken all the rules with this guy. I’m sure it’s a sign of relaxed, third-time-around parenting. He’s had citrus. He’s had dairy. Yesterday — a scorcher of a day at 90 degrees — we let him taste ice cream for the first time. Why not? The second that deliciousness met his tongue, his eyes lit up, euphorically. I would have never allowed ice cream at eight months with my firstborn or even with the toddler. Poor guys.

He is playful and silly with a hearty laugh that comes from a place deep within his belly. He entertains himself for minutes on end, meandering his way through the house, finding play and inspiration in everyday items. He can maneuver a lid from a saucepan for half an hour, banging it loudly against the kitchen floor.

He has four teeth now, while more are quickly pushing through, just as his six-year-old brother’s are slowly falling out. They are a study in contrasts.

He is playful and easily entertained, my little bundle of wonder and whimsy. He loves to clap along when I sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to him, his jack-o-lantern grin illuminating the room, nose scrunched up in wild laughter. He dances too, squatting up and down, bobbing his head to the beat. I know I’m biased, but it’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen.

He is magic to me.

Like Riding a Bike

So this happened recently:

The photo makes it look pretty effortless, but I’m a firm believer that photos lie and behind many photos, there’s often a narrative completely contradicting what the photo depicts on the surface. Like when smiling, happy couples are captured arm in arm at a party, but nobody knows, just moments before, they had a major argument in the car on the way over.

So, this photo portrays training wheels coming off and the 6-year-old willingly tearing down a path on his bike. Right?

Wrong.

If there were outtakes, they’d go something like this (through tears):

“I CAN’T! I don’t WANT to! I’m not GOOD at this! But, I don’t want to FALL (*crash*).

“You SEE, I told you I would FALL. Why are you making me DO this?! I want to go HOME! Can we PLEASE go home right now? I HATE this! I’m not GOOD at this! Am I DONE now? But I CAN’T do this! I don’t WANT to do this!”

“I HATE this.”

And repeat.

And repeat some more.

He’s had absolutely no interest in riding a bike. He’s never asked for a bike nor has he ever asked to learn to ride one. But it was time. He’s tall for his age — people think he’s eight or nine — and I knew he was coordinated enough to do it. He just looks like he should know how to ride a bike, you know? He’s in first grade and many of his friends can ride a bike and — okay I’ll admit it — I felt some peer pressure to get him on a bike. I  guess I felt like he might be a forty-five-year-old non-bike-riding grown man one day and he’d probably be quite fine with that, unless I initiated the training wheels coming off.

And you know what?

After all the whining and dramatic dialogue and tears and “I CANT’S!” he figured it out in fifteen minutes, flat. He was off, just like that. And then, after one reluctant loop around the park, he was done.

I have the most difficulty navigating this aspect of his personality. He’s extremely cautious about trying anything new and is so afraid of failure, he’d rather not try it in the first place. If, usually after lots of coaxing on my part, he does end up trying something new and he finds he’s decent at it and it wasn’t all that bad, he’ll stop right there, so as not to push his luck.

Truthfully, he has many of the same anxieties I had as a child (and some I still have as an adult) about leaving his comfort zone. As a parent, I never know how much to try to push him out of that safe, familiar world he dwells in without pushing too hard. I mean, at what point do you become that Tiger Mom who’s forcing her child to practice the piano seven days a week against their will so they’ll rebel one day and hate the piano altogether and probably hate you in the process?  At the same time, when are you being too laid back with a child who would really be okay eating the same breakfast, lunch and dinner day in and day out if you let him, watching the Star Wars trilogy ad infinitum, until he’s practically memorized the entire script?

When do you nudge or initiate and when do you just let it go?

I admittedly get impatient with his refusal to just try. This applies to new foods, solving math equations, sounding out complicated words, making his own bed, brushing his own teeth, showering on his own, and so on and so on.

It is this part of parenting that’s most challenging for me, nuanced and ambiguous, not outlined in child-rearing books, without concrete answers, specific to each unique, multi-faceted child with their own quirks and traits. I find parenting infants so much easier, their needs straightforward and readily met. Their cries for food or comfort accommodated with milk and cuddling.

With him, there are times I don’t have the right answers and I’m not even sure there is such a thing as “right answers” and sometimes I feel like I’m making it all up as we go along.  So far, I’ve found parenting to be a long string of dilemmas and decisions and conundrums punctuated with breakthroughs and wonder and joy and love all mixed together.

We make mistakes, we learn from them, we fall down, we get back up on the bike and keep riding, with skinned knees and scabs and hopefully, we don’t end up broken in the process.