I know, I know, it’s Thursday and so I should be posting a TILT. But this week, a TILT list would actually be quite boring to read because all of the bullet points would say, “Dax did X” and “Dax loves Y” and “Dax this” and “Dax that” so really, despite my feeble attempts to not become a “mom blogger” (ugh) I should just write a proper blog post, shouldn’t I?
It would be cliche of me to lament about how “they grow up so fast” but SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS they grow up so fast. Check out this picture, for example. The image on the left is from when Dax was just a few days old. The one on the right was taken a couple weeks ago.
Remember how I was pregnant just yesterday? Like, seriously, the day before today I was pregnant. (Okay, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe, just maybe, it’s been longer than that. But it doesn’t feel like that.)
In two days, my baby boy will be six months old. Yes, you read that right. Six. Months. Half a year. I can’t believe it’s been six months since I brought my sweet little boy into this world and yet, at the same time, I can’t believe he’s only been here for six months. I can hardly imagine life without him here. As you can tell from the above photo, he’s been growing and changing ever since he was conceived, meeting milestones every couple weeks or so, making his dad and me so proud.
This week, however, my kid hit a handful of milestones in a matter of DAYS, leaving me breathless and struggling to keep up, sadly wondering, Where did my baby go?
First, at the beginning of this week, he started sitting up by himself.
Fair enough. Babies around his age should start sitting up on their own. Fine.
Then, we noticed that he’s only waking once, if at all, to nurse at night. Wow. Sleeping through the night, like, for real now. Hmm. K.
Then, a couple nights ago, my husband and I recalled the sheet we got from Dax’s pediatrician that stated that a baby at this age he should have started eating solid foods by now. Still breastfed, sure, but with solids, too.
Ouch. Okay.
Which catapulted us into an intense discussion about How could we miss this? What have we been doing? Solids already? But he’s just a baby! He doesn’t even have teeth! Okay, so, we start this now then? What food do we give him first? Vegetables or rice cereal? Why rice cereal? It’s just refined carbohydrates. Can’t we jump straight into avocados? Is that even okay? But he’s just a baby!
A friend of mine told me that when we introduce solids it might be a good idea to also introduce a sippie cup (NOT A BOTTLE?!) of water at dinner time, just so that Dax gets used to the idea. When I told Dan this he blew up at me.
“We can’t do that! He’s too little for that!”
“No he’s not!” I argued.
“I’m Googling it!” After he looked it up on his phone, he scoffed triumphantly. “HA! See? He can’t have water until he’s six months old!”
“He’ll be six months old on SATURDAY.”
“Well, still!”
(It makes me feel good to know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want him to keep growing up.)
And finally, yesterday I went to pick Dax up from Dan the church. While Dan was strapping Dax into his infant car seat — the one in which he came home from the hospital — Dan stood up and told me, “We need a new car seat.”
I was dumbfounded. “A new car seat, ” I repeated as a sentence, not a question.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “He’s too big for this one.”
“He’s too big for this one,” I responded robotically.
Sitting up on his own. Sleeping through the night. Eating solids. Sippie cups of water. Too big for his car seat. Six months.
This week has just been too much for my mommy heart to handle.
The thing about hitting milestones is that you can’t unhit them. Once you know how to sit up on your own, you don’t need your mom to hold you up anymore. That’s it. You sit up. Once you know how to crawl, you can’t not know how to crawl. Once you walk…
And so on and so forth.
I think the milestone I’m struggling the most with is the food thing. Because we’re passionate about breastfeeding, up until this point, I was the ONLY person on the PLANET that could feed Dax. The. Only. Now, I’m not enough for him. Now, he needs more. He needs me still, sure, but he also needs others. And soon, he won’t need me at all.
Ouch.
Physical growth milestones are obviously a great metaphor for our emotional/spiritual growth. You saw that coming right? And, because this is FBDC, you probably expected me to turn the blog post that direction. But NO. Right now, I simply want to whine about the fact that my baby boy is slipping through my fingers at an alarming rate and I’m not handling it well.
BRB researching breastfeeding benefits for people past infancy and how long is too long for co-sleeping.
fueled by diet coke 