Beyond Baby (but don't grow up too fast)

My first real, true experience with a kid I loved more than life itself was with my almost 12-year-old sister.

After college, she was just a few months old, and I lived with my dad and nannied for her while in grad school.

It was with her I made many mistakes (like when I forgot to buckle the car seat into the car and she rolled to the other side when I turned the corner), but it was also a time that I learned a lot about what it is to nurture and love and watch a little human being grow right before my eyes.

I learned how to do random things, too, like clip baby's nails, and thaw breast milk, and perfect airplane noises to deliver strained peas to her tummy, and that those toddler teething biscuits are like super glue once they dry.

This is also when I learned that when all else fails, drive the kid to Target and buy stuff.

Olivia (my sister) and I would get all kinds of looks of pity. I still look like I'm fifteen, so you can imagine that twelve years ago, other Target customers deemed me a perfect candidate for Teen Mom well before the show's existence.

When I would get Olivia to nap, I would rejoice...even if it was for three hours in my arms because it was the only place she would sleep, and my arm would be numb, and I couldn't quite reach the remote to change the channel without shifting her and I was stuck watching three hours of TLC's A Baby Story (which then made me terrified to have kids).

When she rolled over and smiled and learned words and learned to walk, I was there for it all, and my heart swelled with joy.

Naively, I truly wondered what parents had to look forward to past all the "firsts" of baby-dom.

I soon took my first student teaching placement and Olivia was a year and a half. Many of my high school students were performing in the school play and asked if I would go, and I absolutely did.

I made a night of it, took my (now husband) to dinner and then got comfy in those auditorium seats.

Only a few minutes in and I cried. It was really so silly, as I'd only known these kids a few months and yet I was so completely proud of what they were doing on that stage.

This is what parents look forward to past the age of two, I thought.

It was an important lesson for me to learn at twenty-two, because it's something I look forward to now.

Watching my boys as babies has been awesome--and all of the firsts that made me so excited with Olivia I got to relive with them and they were that much more special because they were mine.

And now Will is starting to read, and it makes me teary. And he is playing sports and excelling at what he chooses to do, and it makes me teary.

This past weekend at his first basketball game was another such moment, and it made me so stinkin' proud.

And full of tears.

I can't wait to see all of the awesome things you and your brother do, I thought.

I can, however, wait for that high school graduation (not to mention kindergarten, and middle school, and that first day of high school). At said graduation, I will be the sobbing, blubbering idiot in the balcony. Send tissues if you're there.

Oh, the place you'll go, I'll think. And then, When did you get so grown up?

-Kristin