It’s funny. When Brad and I decided to procreate, I was never very into the whole concept of having a baby. I figured it was just the necessary path to having a kid. You put in your time taking care of the screaming, pooping little bugger and eventually it graduates from babyhood and becomes a fun kid you can have conversations with and build things with Legos together, or something. I never would have expected I’d be waxing poetic about that new baby smell.
Yet I can’t keep track of all the new things Eva is doing now and lately I’ve been feeling like everything’s moving too fast. And, man, sometimes it’s hard to see her grow and change so fast. Every single day feels somehow like I’m being forced to let go. I never knew this is what parenthood would feel like. There are so many things to look forward to in the future, but they’ll all eventually come at the price of her wrist fat, her gummy grin, her little excited grunts as she’s about to start nursing, her peach-fuzz head, the way she holds up her feet or hands to my face so I’ll nibble on them.
Just in this last week, Eva has started sitting up completely on her own. She’s getting scarily good at reaching for things and lunging toward stuff. Nothing is safe if it gets within a certain radius around her. It’s amazing how keenly aware she is of everything going on around her and how determined she is to grab everything and see if she can figure out how to chew on it.
She’s also decided she really wants food, so in addition to the rice cereal we’ve been giving her for a while, we gave her her first taste of sweet potatoes today. She took to them like it was the most natural in thing in the world to be eating sweet potatoes. She hardly even made a mess, since she was so determined to actually eat the stuff instead of just play with it.
I keep feeling like I’m going to wake up tomorrow and I’ll have a toddler, and then next week she’ll be starting kindergarten and then before I know it she’ll be graduating from high school and then I’ll be an old granny. I’m running down a hill and my legs can’t keep up with the rest of my body and the only way I can keep from falling down is to just run faster. Again: not what I expected parenthood to feel like.
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