Wittle One Turns Two!

Today our Wittle One turns two years old! On one hand, it is hard to believe that the time has flown by so quickly since he was born. I can still remember going to my nephew's karate tournament the morning before he was born. Although I could feel mild contractions come and go, I was comfortable enough that I was even able to go shopping that evening with my husband. It wasn't until we got home after shopping that the pain went from tolerable to me-crying-aloud intolerable. It happened in a matter of minutes. I went into the shower and my husband was under the impression that everything was still progressing nice and slowly. Within minutes, I emerged from the shower doubled over in pain saying that we needed to go to the hospital immediately. From that moment, everything was a jumble in my mind for about the next month.

While it may be hard for me to believe that time has passed by so quickly, it also feels like an eternity since our now little guy was just a helpless little 8 pound lump. It's hard to imagine that he was so recently a little baby who wasn't even able to smile. Heck, it's hard to remember life before he could walk, run, jump, kick, and climb stairs--and all of this he learned within the last year.

I think that having such a weird sense of time as feeling both short and long is due to the fact that our lives are now made up of two sensibilities: our adult perspective from which time flies and then seeing the world from our son's point of view. As an adult, a weekend flies by in the blink of an eye, the stress of the holidays takes us on a high speed ride from November straight on through February, and years go by when some parts of our lives may seem like they hardly change at all. Meanwhile, I remember time went so slowly when I was a kid. It felt like torture to go on an hour car ride somewhere, summer vacation felt like an eternity, and kids who were just a grade above me seemed so much more sophisticated and intimidating.

One made-up theory I have is that babies experience life in "slower motion" much like you always hear happens when there is an emergency like a car wreck. For a baby, each day is packed full with new discoveries, just being awake from morning until noon is intense enough to require taking a nap, and the difference of a few months can mean the addition of multiple pairs of teeth, a couple of pounds in weight, and inches in height. Perhaps it is in moments when so much is going on all at once that the perception of time must slow down to accomodate it.

Another fun way I have always liked to think about time is in terms of fractions. For instance, being nearly 32 years old means that a single year is a small thing to me since it is just 1/32 or about 3% of my life. For my son, a single year is obviously a much bigger deal as it is half of all his life experience! When I think about life in this way, it also makes me less sad that my baby is growing up and changing, because last year, he had only been in my life for 1/31 of it. This year, he will have been in my life for a much greater 1/16 of it, and by time he is just 5 years old, he will make up a whopping 1/7 of my life.

Before applying my fraction logic to my son, I applied it to my mother. For instance, when I turned 30, she was 60, and thus I was 1/2 her age, or put another way, I had been a part of half her life. This also meant from that point on, I would always make up more than half her life--I was a majority. Since I am similarly about 30 years older than my son, it will take another 28 years before he starts to make up my majority. I definitely do not wish time to go by too fast, because I am cherishing every moment I get to spend with him. I also, however, do not want to regret the passage of time that is unavoidable and unstoppable--rather than mourn its loss, I hope to take pride in all of the fractions that I'm building up.