Kids, These Days

Last night, I was flicking through the pictures on Dr Pop's iPhone, the ones he'd recently synced to the computer after all my meticulous sorting and saving and filing. I was focusing on some of the older pictures. The ones where Boy Pop was still a toddler. I kept saying, "Awww! Look at this one!" and turning the phone to him so he could see whatever of the hundreds of pictures that I thought were just too cute!

And then I said it. I miss that boy. And I do. I miss that stage. Heck, I even miss the older baby stage. I miss it. My uterus twinged. I went on for a very short time, and then Dr Pop brought me back down to earth... (I'm going to paraphrase here), "Yeah, you miss that part, but having another child would not end well for us." In other words, yeah. I'm not willing to risk losing my mind for another two years on the off chance that we'd have another boy (no girls, no thank you!) and that the baby would sleep through the night and generally be a good-natured child. Too risky!

But I do miss the stages that have passed since he started sleeping through the night. There was something to treasure in each and every one of them.

I guess it really hit home for me in the past couple of weeks. He just looks so much like a boy and not a baby now. And he speaks like an adult sometimes. It's a little freaky. And then, yesterday morning, he walked into the bathroom right after I'd finished drying my hair, wearing nothing but a red corduroy button-down shirt (fully buttoned!) and underwear.

My child woke up after having an accident in bed, went down to the laundry room, where he stripped off the wet PJs and underwear and put them in the laundry basket, went to the other bathroom and relieved himself, went to his closet for new underwear, dragged a chair over to the open door, climbed up, picked out what he thought was a uniform shirt, pulled it off its hangar, put it on, and buttoned it up.

How grown up is that??? He's totally ready for the college experience of passing out cold after a hard night of drinking, only to be woken up by that warm, wet sensation that can only mean he was too drunk to get up and go to the bathroom. My job is done.