Brandon Gilbert

When you spend all day, every day with a person, you usually don’t see changes in them. With your spouse, unless it’s a new hair color or something drastic, most changes seem to go unnoticed. It usually takes someone on the outside to see changes and comment on them, like a little lost weight here, or some gained weight there. I’ve learned that this does not apply to the little guy living here.

Spending all day, every day with my son is a blessing. As much as TheBrandNewMom and I would love for our circumstances to be different, we realize that having at least one of us here to take care of him is a great gift. Still, even though I am constantly with him, changes seem to come very drastically and without warning. TheBrandNewSon is a goal setter. He decides that he’s going to do something, and then he makes it happen.

When we wanted him to roll over, we would put him in the floor for some tummy time. He hated tummy time. He got to be so defiant about it, he would lay there and just go to sleep instead of actually trying to roll over or scoot a little. One day, he just decided that enough was enough. We had him laying on our bed with us, and he just flipped right over very matter-of-factly. Once he did, he felt he was accomplished. He knew he could do it, so there was no need to prove it again. It was a couple of weeks before he would do it again.

After he became a roller, we tried to get him to crawl. For weeks, he would get up into crawling position, and then he would crawl….backwards. Finally, he made up his mind that it was time to crawl, so he did…he wanted something and he went and got it. Again, he had accomplished his goal, another life skill learned and it’s been a while for us to try to get him to crawl again. He’s crawled a few times, but mostly he would kind of pout as if to say, “I did this once, you know I can do it, so why are you asking me to do it again? I am not a circus monkey.”

Fast forward to the last week. He’s been crawling whenever he wants to get around. He’s decided he wants to crawl and explore now. Today was exceptionally eventful. Today I put him in the floor and he crawled a good 4 feet away to get to the MegaBlocks he likes to eat…er, play with. when he got done, though….he crawled back to Daddy! Then, he proceeded to pull up on me and stand up (another one of those pesky life skills we’ve been working on)! I picked him up and put him in my lap. We laughed and played “Tickle Monster.” When we were done with that, he slid back down to get in the floor and crawled back over to the MegaBlocks, and repeated the whole process until he had tired himself out and it was nap time.

It seems like so much time passes, and then BAM! He decides he’s ready to graduate to a whole ‘nother level of baby awesomeness. I’ve definitely learned that I have to quit watching for milestones, though. It makes the time fly by that much faster. You keep looking ahead to the next milestone, and you miss out on all the cool little stuff that happens in between. This is advice I shared with a new Twitter friend, Chris, who’s Twitter name is @twistedxtian if you want to follow him. He’s a dad who’s studying to be a Pastor…in Canada. He has a 6 month old, affectionately called “Bean.” I see stuff he writes on his blog, and remember what it was like when we were going through those same things. While they’re only 3 months behind us, it feels like an eternity.

I remember holding Ryne on my chest a couple of days after he was born and wishing for nothing else but that time would stop and let me freeze in that moment forever. Now, if it had, I would have missed a lot of really cool stuff…like having my son look me in the eye and say “DaDa.” There are so many moments to hold onto, but they just keep fading away and are replaced very quickly with new ones. I don’t mind him growing up, but I would like it to go at a slower pace. I would like to know one thing… Who ordered the Miracle Grow?