a very merry half-birthday

Yesterday, George turned six months old. A whole half year. The other day, a friend summed up life with an infant perfectly: the days are interminable and the months go by fast as lightning. One minute you are holding a peely, puffy-eyed newborn and the next, he is sitting up and jamming the spoon of sweet potatoes into his own mouth, grinning. If someone had told me that my baby would refuse to sleep alone (or at all, in the beginning), be a constant nurser for the first 3 months of his life, never nap, get teeth at four months or generally be as assertive as George has proven himself, I may have rethought pregnancy. What a terrible mistake that would've been.


Those are precisely the reasons that I love my son. He knows what he wants. He comes by his particularity honestly; I am easily the most decisive and opinionated person I know. He makes his needs known. His boundaries are firm. These are the qualities I most prize in my best-loved friends and family. He wants to be close to those who love him. He is hungry often and lets me soothe him with food, like the Italian and Polish mama in me wants to do. When he's happy, which he mostly is, it's unbridled, honest, without affectation. He has a lot more to teach me.