Becoming

I am finally starting to get why people have more than one kid. I mean, yes, all the usual reasons, but also: it all goes by so fast. I can measure how he has grown at the end of every single day: the new words he has learned, pronunciations mastered, the behaviors outgrown and the new ones acquired. Seriously, in the course of a day.

Dash is a week shy of 18 months and Josh & I are already so lonesome for mannerisms he has abandoned. Literally, the baby will start a new way of walking (for example: swinging both arms in unison in order, we assume, to propel him just a wee bit faster toward his goal) and as soon as Josh gets a workable impersonation going, whoosh, it's gone. On to the next thing. Thank god Josh has a better memory for all of the darling things that came and went in the blink of an eye, because if it were up to me to recall it all may as well never happened.

Last night I was searching around in his dresser looking for pjs that don't smell like mold (everything in his dresser has suddenly started to smell like mold. I'm getting a little worried) and I found one of the rompers he lived in last summer. He was just 6 months old and spent all day every day in some variation of this:


Coming across that romper took my breath away, a little like a punch in the stomach. I just can't believe that he has been around long enough to have made progress. To have outgrown something. It really does make one nearly insane enough with grief for those moments of babyhood you'll never get back to just start again from scratch.