Baby Time

The mysterious thing about raising a child is how the time can move so glacially and yet so swiftly at once. If you are at home with your child even several days a week you know what I mean--a child's day passes in many small increments, inside which so many things happen. Whereas my free hours tend to pass in a blur of activities, where I can hardly recall what I did over the course of several hours, my time spent with my son is broken into various forms of play and discovery, acts of changing diapers and feedings, attempts to distract fussy moods and capitalize on good ones. By day's end I feel like I worked a full-time job in one day.

The first four months of his life did not move fast for me at all. Wakefulness and hormones combined in such a way I often felt like I couldn't wait for the next minute to pass--and I was counting the seconds. And yet suddenly he's 9 months old and sitting up on his own, can play by himself, is trying to crawl and speaking his own little babble language that gets more complex every week. He's not the helpless little newborn anymore. He eats solid food--he doesn't fuss in the car anymore. He's changing so fast.

So it is going faster all the time, but I'm glad that I still get to experience baby time, the languid pace of learning about the world as he explores it. And I know he'll be in kindergarten before I know where the time has gone.