The Blogging Hour
I've been waking up in the early morning hours and finding it hard to go back to sleep sometimes, and it occurred to me today that I haven't posted in a while, and that this is the perfect time for blogging without distraction. This time, I was thinking about old friends I don't talk to anymore and marveling at how much my life has changed over the course of 10 years. I wouldn't trade now for then, but I sometimes wish my relationships had been more additive than substitutive -- that my social life had grown more beyond my family as well as within it. It's hard now to meet new people outside of work, and especially in the pandemic, work relationships aren't a full substitute for friendships. My family is my whole world right now, and while that's probably as it should be, it isn't without compromises and nostalgia.
That being said, the other thing I've been thinking about is how much I have to look forward to as a father. The first six months of childrearing were challenging beyond my imagination, but at 8.5 months, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and thinking more about how much love and joy my relationship with my son is going to bring me, hopefully for as long as I live. He's my biggest fan, and loves to be carried around by me, back and forth through the house, babbling and singing (in an amusing baby way), and his face lights up with unmitigated excitement when he sees me. Except for my parents, I don't think anyone has loved me that way, and even though there are a lot of frustrations with being a parent, I'm looking forward to all that is to come. We are starting to think about having a second child, and while that is sure to present its own challenges, and be different in some ways than our time alone with our first, I'm optimistic about that too.
Our son is crawling proficiently now and learning to pull himself up to stand, although that is still a bit wobbly and needs supervision. We think he will be walking within a few months, and that will be a big milestone. He still doesn't have any teeth, but he loves to eat, and we haven't found any foods he doesn't like yet. He's at the top of the growth charts for weight and only 80th percentile for height, but we are assuming that he will balance out when he starts running around and eating more solid foods and less formula, so we aren't worried at this age. He looks like a happy, healthy baby; fit for a diapers ad. He also understands a fair amount of what's going on around him. We have a Portal TV that we use to keep in touch with my parents, and he loves that interaction, and my wife taught him the meaning of the word clap and he'll often clap if you ask him to. He doesn't really say any real words yet, but you know he understands some of them.
That's all for tonight I think. I wonder sometimes who reads this -- I'd love it if anyone who follows this blog regularly would leave me a note sometime introducing themself.