Growing Up, Moving On

At five months (!), Tiny Boy is old enough that I can't accurately recall his age in weeks (maybe 22?).  He took a ride in the real stroller (sitting up!) yesterday, which was followed up by a trip to the park and a "dinner" of rice cereal, which he did not reject.

I look at his preemie clothes and really can't imagine that they actually fit him.  He's grown, like, 6 inches and 8 pounds since then.  His abdomen is literally twice as wide as it was at birth, and his wrists, too.  Not so tiny, it seems.

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I hold him in the rocking chair and am already nostalgic for the baby he once was.  I want him to grow up.  I want him to stay this small forever.  I think, this is the last time I will ever have a baby this small.

I did not mourn the passing of LG's babyhood.  She was a hard baby.  And as much as I wanted to be pregnant, as much as I wanted to have a child, I did not enjoy her first six months.  They were full of inconsolable screaming, even as I starved myself to feed her.  Once she was on Neocate, once she started sitting up/crawling/standing (all within a 3 week period at 6 months) she was a happier kid, and I was a happier mom.  Not coincidentally, that's also when I went back to work.

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If there is a silver lining to 3 years of fertility treatment and loss, it is having children 8 years apart, which I never thought I wanted.  I sit in the rocking chair with my little boy and then I read Harry Potter with my big girl.  She dotes on him and he adores her.  She is not jealous, at least not in obvious ways.

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It's been a year, and I am still astonished that it actually worked.  That an embryo implanted itself in the wall of my uterus and grew, that it outwitted all that wanted to stop it from doing so, that it became a boy who is now my son, with his bright blue eyes and huge grin and easy (oh, so easy, compared to LG) temperament.

And for all that I have been irritated with work, I recognize how fortunate I am that I will be able to spend the bulk of his first year at home with him.  This summer he'll have a babysitter for 15-20 hrs week, during which I will finally get that book manuscript finished, and by the time fall semester rolls around and he'll be in full-time daycare, he'll be 10 months.  10 months!

And maybe by then he'll be sleeping.  For now, I'll take these moments of sitting next to him in bed for 40 minutes at a stretch because, really, they'll be over soon.  And in the blink of an eye, he'll be reading Harry Potter and LG will be off at college.  And I really don't want to think about that...