Who's So Big?

One expression has it that babies grow noticeably overnight, so rapid is their weight and height gain. I have no evidence to dispute this. In the case of my beloved muffin, she appears to grow noticeably when I turn my head. Meanwhile, the speed of change is extreme to someone who spends hours and hours every day with the child; I cannot imagine how sudden the change will seem to her grandparents, my folks, in California when they see her at Christmas, the two of them having spent time with her in August when she was a newborn.

The effects of her growth are many: Her first car seat doesn’t look to be part of her life for long, likewise her table-top infant seat and Graco swing. Outfit after outfit has been retired, plenty of them cute enough to have emotions attached to them by now. And she loves to stand to her full height with her feet on my belly, smiling and declaiming while looking down at her dad on the couch, as though she knows she’s tall for her age and thinks it’s fun. One of the happiest parts of seeing someone so comfortable in her own skin is to be reminded how enjoyable having a body was probably intended by nature to be – before guilt and shame create temporal eddies of woe.