Baby trade offs

We used our last newborn diaper on Brice yesterday. They still fit him, but barely, and they won’t fit long enough to justify buying another package. I set one aside when I decided to move him up to size 1’s, to keep with his baby items. I looked back at pictures of him in them when he was 5 days old, so incredibly small, just swimming in that diaper. His little naked body is scrawny and bony. You can count his ribs; see his sternum like a button sticking out of the middle of his chest. He looks like a baby bird that fell from a nest. And now those diapers don’t fit. And he looks more like a Butterball turkey.

I put away the outfit he came home from the hospital in. Like the diapers, it still fits, but barely. His feet stretch at the ends, and he fills the middle. I don’t have the heart for trying to put it on him and seeing that he’s outgrown it. It felt better to take it off of his little body, warm and smelling like him, and put it in the Ziploc baggie on top of my dresser designated for such memorabilia.



I’ve been bathing him in my blue bread bowl. It’s shallow and fits in the sink, and his little body curls into it. It takes mere seconds to fill, and the baby tub my friend Holly gave me was way too big for his 6 pound frame. But his body fills the bread bowl now, and I know that he is sturdy enough for the actual baby tub now. I will have to get the tub out of storage, and put the bread bowl back in the cupboard soon.

I set aside a bag for clothes that he’s outgrown that I’m not keeping for posterity. It only contains one Onsie right now. But that will change. I know it.



Even towards the end of my pregnancy, I kept thinking that I had to wrap my brain around the idea that a baby was coming. I kept telling my friend Holly that it still felt so surreal. I believe she told me that it was real and I better get used to it because the baby was coming, believe it or not. The pregnancy always felt real, it was the fact that it would lead to a baby that I couldn’t quite grasp. I did the whole nesting thing, got all the things that I needed. I washed and organized and was prepared, but it didn’t feel real. Not until he was born, in which case the reality of his existence, and how much I loved him, both proceeded to hit me like a Mack truck.



Maybe that’s why I feel this need to absorb it all as it happens. Or maybe it’s just because I know that it goes so very fast and this is the last little person that I will grow in my body and call my own. Either way, I would rather stay in the moment with him in my living room than be out anywhere showing him off. He is still the baby that I can’t put down.



But with this growing, with these stages that are left behind, come new blessings. When my daughter Holly was six, she grew out of the last few things that made her seem little and hands on. She started climbing out of the huge Jacuzzi tub by herself, brushing her own hair, getting ready by herself. She had been my little one, and probably let me help her longer than she truly needed it. But one day, out of the clear blue sky, she was doing it on her own. I felt like she didn’t need me anymore. I felt sad for days, trying to adjust to how life would be with just “big kids”. And then, that very week, Holly learned to do a back flip at gymnastics. And then, like 12 back flips, all in a row. She was asked to join the team, and from that moment on my life became more about being a cheerleader and chauffeur than a nose wiper. I settled into it, still needed, only in a different way. If life is a trade off, then parenthood defines it.



So Brice grows by the moment. I swear he wakes up bigger than when he went to sleep. The girls never grew this way; it must be a boy thing. But just as I was ready to get myself good and upset about him growing so fast, I found the tradeoff. A smile. And then another. And now these gummy smiles come when the dog licks his arm, or when Grandma talks to him, or when he sees my face as he wakes up. We can’t elicit them on command, but they are right there beneath the surface, showing up as little surprises.

And if the smiles don’t make up for all the things that are already in the past now, I’m pretty sure that the new dimples in his chubby elbows and the rolls on his neck more than make for an even trade.