Nowhere in This Photo Do I See a Baby.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo PrintingI look and study and blow it up to its maximum size but a baby isn't anywhere to be found. It's as if one night while I was sleeping someone exchanged my little bedbug for a child. A child who holds his girlfriend's hand under the snack table and gives her all his plastic bugs.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing A boy who insists on sitting and listening to every song in its entirety, even if it means sitting in the car with the engine running
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing -- waiting for the song to end. A little person who builds towers out of Legos and paper towel dispensers and proudly shows them off. A kid whose ear can distinguish an airplane from a helicopter , a tractor from a garbage truck -- slow on words, perhaps but quick on sounds and far more knowledgeable than I.

"Grayson, listen! It's an ambulance!"

To which he responds, "fee tuck."

And he's usually right.

"Oh, sorry, Grayson. Mommy's an idiot....it is a fire truck."

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Babies don't tell their mommies they're wrong. Babies don't tell you they love you and make up "mommy songs" that they belt out on walks with the dogs. Babies don't pick dandelions from the weeds
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing and give them to their mommies to blow and keep in a plastic cup
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printingon the sink because it's pretty....babies don't stand on stools to wash their hands or practice combing their hair.



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Saturday, at the birthday party, I watched as our friend swept Grayson up into his arms, his eyes wide and grateful to be included in such childhood shenanigans. Only once did Grayson find his way back into my arms, too thrilled with being trampled on in the bounce house
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing and finding bugs for his bug jar in our back yard.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing Too busy pushing his toy tractor down the slide and then himself.
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And the next morning, while eating breakfast, Grayson asked if he could go outside and jump some more. And babies don't do that either.


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"You love going outside, don't you?" I asked.



"Yeah," Grayson smiled, whipping his hair out of his face like a teenager.


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"After lunch," I promised. "We will go outside after lunch."


I can't believe that three years from now, I will look upon this same face, photos of this face not yet taken, with the same pain, longing, and where-did-the-time-go tears that I have right now, looking at these seemingly grown-up pictures of Grayson about to send him off to kindergarden:

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My beautiful son, child, little boy, whose hazel eyes once followed my every move. And now?

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Every day it is made more clear that I am no longer the center of his world. Instead he has created his own: a magical place where tool-tote-ing dragons blow dandelions and mommies aren't (always) allowed. It is in this world where Grayson will, over time, construct his wings.


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I cannot believe that once upon a time, I held in my body, something so small. A magic bean I knew would grow, but not this fast. Into a child I knew I would love, but nowhere near this much.

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He might as well be a thousand feet high, the way I look at him now. The way I know I will always look at him -- winding like a beanstalk up and into the clouds. Growing up and farther away, my love expanding like the universe around him as his eyes fill with stars.
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