So...what was in that cool aid??

It's remarkable, to me at least, how subtle the changes are as our children grow. It seems like they move from rolling over to rolling out the door for college in the blink of an eye. It has only been two years since Cole arrived, years more since he was a hope in our heart, and it feels like yesterday and forever all at once, so the moments where he becomes a little closer to the great man he will be are the ones that slip up on me and knock me down. Not those ones that we expect. He sat up. So what? They all sit up eventually. It's when they chose not to sit but some other position that you don't expect and that shows how much of a little person roots around in that little toddling body.

Yesterday, he was laying sitting on the couch with his pad of paper, making doodles for his Momma. At one glance to this sweet exchange between mother and son, the boy was doodling on the pad in his lap; in the next, he was laying prone across the cushions so as to have better access to his paper. Now, you could argue that this isn't really a big deal, but I think it is. When a child chooses to adjust from the familiar and the expected and to something else, that is momentous in its normalcy. It's taken for granted, the availability of options, and in these subtle ways they are defining themselves.

Maybe I project too much or let the writer in me run amok too much, but when I see him lean against a doorway, I see him years from now doing the same thing, that same easy stance, that same grace as he peels a thought apart in his head to share it with someone else, his mother while she cooks a meal for him on Christmas break, to me while I collect a bite before we head out to fish, to his friends that he'll have for years and who might never understand where he's at most of the time. I see a toddler, a boy, a man in every part of him that hints of who he'll be.

That's why the little things smack me askew more often than not. Because, in those moments, when he is who he is now and who he'll be years from now, I'm not typically ready for that level of transcendental migration. The here and now is enough most days, and the eventuality of life, of his getting older, of his growing older in that very moment, is more than I can handle. I want to know both at once and forever, the boy he is now, the man he'll be then, and all the people in between.

And, it is in those moments that I realize that that can never be, at least, not all at once. So, I take it in. Enjoy that moment, and the next, and the next. I'd suggest we all do the same.