Little things are big

What I am about to write will interest almost no one. No, truly. Matt and I are terribly excited, and Suzannah was happy to cheer along with us, and possibly our parents will cheer along with us as well, because grandparents put on a good show of being interested in everything having to do with the grandkids (or at least they just call up those memories of what it was like to be in our shoes and play along politely). But to most of the rest of the world, this will not be all that interesting, even for people who like reading about other people's children and/or other people's experiences of raising them. Still, I feel I must record it for my own sake.

Isaac peed in the potty tonight!

My little baby son!

The scene: Friday night, post-bath. I had just come in from an evening run and was eating dinner while Matt finished bathing both of the kids (sidenote: good grief, they're noisy in the bath). Isaac usually gets out first while Suzannah plays a little longer, and I heard the slap slap slap of his fat little feet on the hardwood living room floor. I watched as my naked little son trotted gleefully towards me. He paused next to the dining room table, gave a few cheerful stomps for good measure, laughed at me as if to say HA! I am NAKED!, and trotted back down the hallway as Matt called, "Isaac, get back here, you're making us nervous." Nervous indeed, because this little boy, when left bare-bottomed, has no problem casually peeing on the floor. (This hasn't happened in awhile, but the trust isn't real high. I mean, he doesn't particularly care when his diaper is poopy, either, and doesn't take kindly to our insistence that we change it if he is busy playing.)

So Matt managed to wrangle him into his pajamas and I grabbed his toothbrush. Teeth-brushing has been hit-or-miss; sometimes we have to pretty much hold him down, and sometimes he is quite jolly about playing "Show Mommy your teeth!" Tonight he pushed my hand out of the way and said, "No...potty!"

I have to admit here that I did not take him seriously, because he actually does like to sit on the little potty next to the bathtub sometimes, especially when his sister is sitting on the big potty. (And yeah, Matt and I say potty way too much now, even when we're just talking to each other, which I guess is what happens when you have two children under the age of five?) Once, a long time ago, he squeezed out like three drops of pee at the same time, but I'm pretty sure that was a fluke. Anyway, it was way past his bedtime and I really didn't feel like playing his "let's pretend I'm going potty" game because he always wants to take off his diaper and I just wanted to put him to bed already so I could take my own bath. But he insisted. So I stripped off his diaper and he plopped his chubby little bottom down on the little potty seat and I left the bathroom to do something else for a minute. I don't remember what.

The next thing I knew, though, he was hollering at me. I thought I'd just go in and put his diaper back on and brush his teeth and waltz him off to storytime, but when I went back into the bathroom, he stood up and showed me that he had actually filled up that little Bjorn potty with actual pee. Oh, my word, the cheering. Matt and Suzannah and I went nuts with all the ISAAC! You went POTTY! GOOD JOB! WOO HOOOOO!

He stared at us briefly like we'd just entirely lost our minds, but then he broke into a terribly pleased grin. He grinned and grinned and said, "I did it!" And we were all, "YOU DID IT! YOU WENT PEE! YAY!" Especially Suzannah. What a great little cheerleader.

So Isaac got a little treat for peeing in the potty, and we brushed his teeth and read stories and tucked him into bed, and then I stood in the middle of the kitchen and said to Matt, "I am actually a little sad about this." It's not as though I adore changing diapers, but it's just one more milestone that carries my baby right on out of babyhood. It's all a little hard to take. I thought Isaac would be my little nursling until he was at least three (really), but he tapered off all on his own sometime in the last month. And I hadn't even considered the possibility that he'd be interested in the potty yet, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because he wants to do everything Suzannah does; he wants so much to be a big boy. It's strange. On one hand, I kind of hate this, and yet watching him grow -- watching both my children grow -- brings me so much joy, the greatest joy of my life.

It's a wild ride, this motherhood stuff.

When I did finally turn off the lights tonight, after we'd read our stories and he'd hugged everyone, he held out his arms and I picked him up. He wrapped his arms tightly around my neck and rested his head on my shoulder, and I just breathed in his soft still-baby fresh-out-of-the-bath scent, and we swayed back and forth in the dark of his room. I know that tomorrow he'll play hard outside and start smelling faintly of potatoes behind the ears, and he'll be demanding and too rough with the dog, and he'll holler and laugh and be very much a little boy. Tonight's milestone was one more exciting (if bittersweet) step into childhood, and every day he becomes more and more his own little person, entirely separate from me. But I'll hold these nights for as long as I can, these moments when he wraps his chubby little arms around me and sighs his baby sighs against my neck, and even though I can almost feel the future -- his grown self -- in a real and visceral way, right there in my arms, I'm so grateful for these moments in which the boundaries between baby and boy, or between mama and baby, are still a little blurred.