He's one, for one more day.

We went out to dinner Friday night - all four of us, at our local TexMex staple with the yummiest steak fajitas. Q inhaled his favorite - beans & a chicken quesadilla - & we sat outside (under cover) while it thunderstormed all around us. 

Before we had been seated, I'd told the hostess Three adults & a baby, please. And then I paused immediately, I looked down at my belly & remembered that I'm having a baby - & that I have an almost-two year old who really just isn't one any more. A baby, that is. 

Insert new reality here, please. 

I suppose we learn, grow & develop best (or at least most quickly?) when our comfort levels are shaken up. The past several months I've settled into a really nice level of said comfort - I've felt good & established about where I'm living, I've reached a point where I feel like I'm doing a reasonable job at this whole mothering-a-toddler business, & life has settled into a nice little rhythm of happy things & routine. We've traveled a good amount comfortably (albeit always as a traveling circus), managed family (& mother+son) road trips, can survive church for three hours & even Mike away on frequent business trips - although I start to go a little batty on night #3. Changing any diaper with three wipes or less is generally a breeze, & I know how to get Q to take his medicine when he needs it. I can get to Costco without my GPS (mostly), know which restaurants have have the best highchairs & children's menus & go to one grocery store over another because they're just nicer to kids.   I've sort-of-kind-of figured some things out, & that's a nice feeling. 

I've been feeling comfortable, but fall is in the air (everywhere except Texas, I suppose) & that means change. At least every two years in the Whiting house, anyway.

We have a little boy who is on the cusp of doing so many wonderful things - just teetering his toes on the edge of real childhood, taking hesitant & then more bold steps further into it every day. He's climbing up the ropes at the park, learning new words every day (he showed my mom his mastery of the word Coke! when I popped open a can - thanks, Q), making friends, practicing new tricks & just turning into so much more of a person every day. We really, genuinely love hanging out with him (he's funny! his laugh is infectious!). These past two years have been the longest and the shortest of my life. The happiest, too. Definitely. 

(And now we're teetering on that edge ourselves of starting from scratch with another, while figuring out how to balance that with the first. Heaven help me. Seriously.)

I'm thinking that there's a balance though, between hanging on desperately to those precious first days & months with a child, & embracing & loving the current, the inevitable change that comes. Part of my heart hurts when I think about Quinn turning two - because he's my baby, & when the rush of memories over the past two years come flooding over me, my eyes get stingy. But he still cuddles on my shoulder at night when I'm singing him songs before bed, he loves to hold my hand, curling up & reading stories is one of his favorite things, & gives the sweetest hugs & kisses. There's a new kind of sweetness, & I love that - & that I get to be his mama forever & ever. 

I'm happy, lucky & excited.