Childhood Is Fleeting

Last night I disassembled my son's infancy and put it in the basement. I brought his childhood upstairs and assembled it in his room.

Okay, actually, I took apart his crib and brought in his toddler bed. But that's not how it seems.

Anyone who knows me knows how nostalgic and sentimental I can get. So last night, when I was putting away Duncan's crib, I was feeling a sort of loss. I have absolutely no regrets with him, so don't get me wrong. But I'm going to miss all the fun he had in that crib. I loved to come into his room when he was awake and playing in his crib, hide behind its headboard, and then peek around the corner through the railing and watch him till he noticed me. Then he'd hop up and look over the headboard with his usual enormous smile.

Or you'd put him down for the evening and go back downstairs, and then for whatever reason you had to come back upstairs for something. And no matter how quiet you'd try to be, he'd hear you, and you'd start to head back downstairs and see him staring at you over the headboard, and he'd quietly smile and say "Hi."

But even more than that, that crib is a symbol of so much about him - in fact, if you think about it, it's a symbol of all I know about him. He's always been my baby boy, and I have a picture of him on the first day we put took him from his bassinet and put him into his crib. I'll always remember him struggling to pick his head up, trying to crawl, learning the "E-I-E-I-O" part of "Old McDonald Had A Farm" before he learned anything else, and most of all the smiles that he always had for Jenn and I when we came in to get him from his crib.

Tonight, we'll get a picture of him from his first night in his new toddler bed. And we'll start a whole new section of his life - the childhood years. I can't wait, and I wish they never had to come.