6 months today

I unwrapped Peter yesterday from his napping swaddle to rush him off to pick up the kids from school.  He stretched and I choked up when I noticed that there was only a tiny trace left of his newborn sleepy scrunched up hands over the head stretch.   He still wriggled in his sleepiness and took a minute to open his eyes, but before I knew it he was awake with those big eyes searching me, inquisitive, aware, alert, alive. 

He’s growing up.  About ten times a day I simultaneously think: “There is no way this can be the end of babyness for me….I love this so much” and “This has to be the end, I am stretched to my limit.”  I find myself wishing with all my might for some kind of contraption that would allow me to capture this part of my motherhood before it's gone.  Sure, there are pictures, and videos and thank goodness for the iPhone but none of those things come close to bottling up what I want to remember.  I think I’ll look back at pictures and watch my iPhone videos and my heart will scream to reach in and grab him.  To smell the crease in his neck, to squeeze his chubby thighs, to pull him tight into my arms, to blow kisses into his mouth and rub noses with him.  I’ll long to engage with him, get sucked into our ‘conversations’ and gazes.  To find something new that will make him chuckle, or wonder, or study or sigh.

Can’t apple come up with something like that?  Some way to record smells and touch and emotions and joy and love and interactions?  I’m pretty sure we’re never going to get that technologically advanced, the present if fleeting and I think God designed it that way.  I think He wants me to learn how to live in the moment without worrying about how I’m going to miss it so much.  So, I’m trying to be still, to look into Peter’s eyes, let his baby perfection fill me before it’s gone.

Last night as I nursed him to sleep, in the stillness of his dark room and between sucks he sighed over and over again.  As content as could be.  I love how simple it is to make babies happy. 

I drank him in in the darkness.  I felt a blissful moment of true joy with no worry about it fleeting.  And even though I can never experience that moment again, it changed a part of the fabric of my soul.  I was there, all of me was present and it etched itself into me, forever, and surely that’s better than anything Steve Jobs can come up with.