He’s a busy kinda guy

Bacon Bit is nine months old now, and he is one busy little fella.

He likes to stand and ‘cruise’, pulling himself along the sofa or a table or your leg whatever else presents itself. He can crawl at about nine miles a second and can get through a door or a gate that has been left open before you even realize he’s noticed it.

He can also climb the stairs all by himself. We didn’t know he could do it until he demonstrated for us on Mother’s Day. “He’s on the stairs!” someone sings out and by golly – so he is. Crawling like a demented lunatic, right up the stairs. (My adored son often looks like a demented lunatic – like right immediately now, for instance: he’s standing up leaning on my rocking chair banging frantically on a broken computer keyboard we’ve relegated to ‘toy’ status. Good Lord. I wonder what he thinks he’s programming into that chair…?)

He then tried to go down the stairs – headfirst, and at a fast crawl. He has no fear. “Hey, I wanna go back down where the party is!” he decides and off he goes! And was very irritated, thank you, by my wild grab for his hips. Yo, babe, yer slowin’ me down here…!

His day is pretty full. It can be hard to schedule things like, say, a diaper change or a snack, because he has got so many things to do.

I mean, he’s got to pull all the videos off the shelf, for Pete’s sake! You think those videos are going to pull themselves down? No sirree! It takes skill, and dedication, and a single-minded devotion to duty to get those videos down on the floor where they belong!

And let us not forget that the floor underneath the table must be cleared of debris left by sisters. There is always at least a crumb of potato chip or perhaps a sliver of turkey or something under there – and it is his duty to collect and eat it.

Then there are TV buttons to be played with, a remote to be chewed upon, and naturally some kind of uck needs to be deposited on Mommy’s left shoulder absolutely as soon as possible.

Yeah, he’s one busy guy, that Bacon Bit. But occasionally, he’s willing to give us the benefit of his full attention for a few minutes.

We were all singing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” yesterday, and he dropped everything to listen in. And laugh hysterically at the ‘dah nah nah nah nah nah nah’ part. He’d sit there waiting, breathless with anticipation, a tiny smile loitering around his little rosebud lips, as we got through the chorus ‘…there goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt’ and as we started the ‘dah nah nah nah nah nah nah’ he’d fire off a machine-gun laugh: eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!

He goes-goes-goes in three to four hour bursts and then suddenly - !THUMP!. It’s over. He turns from Mr. Affable into this howling, fussing, glaring-eyed little ball of neediness. After hours of struggling and lunging toward the toys when picked up for diapers changes and so forth, suddenly nothing will do but to be held, cradled in mommy’s arms, perhaps fed a bottle, staring up sleepily into my eyes, lazily exploring my face and hair with one questing hand until he drifts off to sleep.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the transitory nature of his childhood. Nine months old now? Surely not. A matter of weeks, maybe, but nine months?

Impossible.

He’s growing before my eyes. I just know I’m going to blink and a man is going to be before me, tall and strong like his daddy. I’m going to ask myself who that good-lookin’ stranger is, and it’s going to be this little tiny baby who puts his chubby little arms up to me and shrieks with wild delight when I come to lift him out of his crib, smiling at me and leaping into my arms and lunging forward toward the world.

But all grown up now and wondering what’s wrong with Mom now, geeeeeeez, always with the waterworks going…!

And he’s going to be a busy kind of guy. Football practice and dates and meeting up with the guys for some video game time and then there’s the debate club and the future business leaders of America and…

A busy, busy kind of guy.

Hope he’ll be able to find a little time for mommy then, a few minutes in that busy-busy day to talk to me, to let me think I’m still important. A glad-to-see-ya smile wouldn’t suck, either.

Come to think of it…I don’t know that I’ve given my mom one of those for a few years. It’s still inside of me, but it doesn’t come out much.

I wonder if she misses it.
I wonder if she knows it’s still there.
I wonder if I’ll know it’s still inside my kids, when they’re all grown.

I hope so.

But right now there’s a tugging at my leg, and a baby voice is whining. It must be time, time for our pre-nap cuddle. Look at him laugh at me – he knows I’m going to pick him up and hold him close.

While I still can.