Zero and a Half

Will meets his cousin Michael one day before his six-month birthday...

I've been mulling over my words for Will's half-birthday and then forgetting about it, lost in multiple small-scale whirlwinds throughout the day.

There is so much to say, but most of it has already been poured out in the baby journal, intermixed with nap times and ounce totals. "The mundane alongside the profound," I was about to write, but the truth is that most of the time, the mundane is the profound around here. The small, repetitive tasks of the day are equal to the major milestones because every moment is about how much fun Will is to be around.

It hasn't always been this fun, and I'm not naive enough to think that it will last as long as I want it to--namely, forever, although another seventeen years of pure fun might make for some pathological separation anxiety as Will leaves for college.

But right now, it is FUN. He sleeps all night long, so when we all wake up, he's happy and we're happy, and his eyes are sleepy and one cheek is redder than the other from sleeping on his belly.

In that first minute of consciousness, his smile is immediate, his laughter is imminent, his appetite is inevitable. I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with him. When he's tired, I feed him in my arms so he can go to sleep comfortably. When we're in the car, I clap at the red lights to remind him that I'm still there. He entertains himself in carseats, strollers, cribs, and looks at me with pure glee when he accomplishes something.

He buries his head in my neck when he's tired, or sometimes when he's trying to turn to look at something and my neck's impeding his range of motion.

He grunts and whines when he's trying to crawl, but he never loses his focus or his drive.

He grins all the time.

He tries to talk when we talk. He thinks we chat on the phone purely for his amusement, and he giggles accordingly.

If he had a driver's license, it would say "28 inches tall; 18.5 pounds; green/hazel eyes," because those are the things that everyone asks you about. It might also say "Bald; immunizations up-to-date," because people care about those things, too.

Only 5% of six-month-olds are taller than Will, and 25% weigh more. (Only 5% have bigger heads. Seriously, I know there are reasons for measuring their heads, but it always seems so archaic, like it's a holdover from a time when craniometry was the closest they could get to internal medicine. Plus, I truly didn't need a doctor to tell me my kid's head was a wrecking ball.)

Beyond that, I just don't know what to say. I guess no parent does, not when they're in the thick of this transformation, the my-baby's-a-person(-and-an-enjoyable-one-at-that) lovequake. Maybe never?

I'm sure I've left a million things out, both here and in the journal, but I know that if I strain to remember every moment, I'll drive myself batty...and I won't be enjoying the moments when they're here. And right now, they're everywhere.