Time Lapse

The Lad® has spent a week at his grandparents. He has been out there before for a few days at a time and there was some concern about how the grands would have managed with him for a whole week, but unreliable sources (my eyes) indicate that they are not as worn out as we may have dreaded.

The passage of a mere week, however, was marked by some significant albeit ineffable changes in The Lad®. There is a bit more maturity in his voice as he speaks and last night he was casually talking about as he put it, his "little girlfriend" from the swim classes he took while he was with his grandparents. For a more obvious sign of growth was his use of the word "unraveled" to talk about the metres of toilet paper heaped on the floor under the roll. He gave me the sense that the toilet paper fell off on its own rather than encounter his own kittenish curiosity with the roll. I digress.

The changes that occurred this week, apart from the vocab, made me wonder how much you can actually miss by always being there. Were the changes in his tone, the look in his face and the confidence that probably came from a week of fun swimming matters of course that are too subtle to catch each day? It could be that the changes are less perceptible when you are always on top of him, but I'm pretty sure that the version of independence that occurs at Baba and Papa's, not to mention the new social circle at swimming lessons, prompted the changes we noticed after a week apart. As minor as they were they are undeniable.

What will we notice after summer camps a few years from now?

As Ever, On the Cusp of Transition

I should treasure this day for the more fleeting moments of childhood that adorn calendars on the theme of innocence or some such attribute of early youth. The sight of him stopping to smell a neighbour's flowers as the thunderclouds loom and darken. His fascination with the spores of a dandelion as he sends them into flight. The translucent down on his upper arms as I put sunscreen on his arms. These are all things that we try to convince ourselves that we saw and treasured, but there is the risk that we have a template of our child's growth and experiences that we assume conforms to a catalogue or a parenting magazine rather than be mindful and conscious of them as the occur out of the corner of our eye.  Today I can assure myself that I did indeed take note of them, and magnified those moments.

There was much today that made me note that those innocent explorations and discoveries will pass. The cool years, much like those thunderheads, seem to loom. With Gabriel at 4 1/2, I may be getting ahead of myself but it is hard to gauge how precocious each generation of kids is actually becoming. That aside, I'm conscious of how my earliest memories take me back to age 5 and also noticing the ways that Gabriel is asserting himself more and expressing his wishes.  I get the sense of the quest that will shape the next decade of his life as he seeks friends and acquaintances to fill the ineffable void that only a sibling can fill. There are also the times when he wants to play with his mother or I and we fill the time as well as we can - ever, in my case, conscious of playing in a way that gives him the lead and lets him set the rules and the standards of mastery.

Today, on a Saturday morning, the challenge was to get him to listen and as a result of that challenge it took him about three hours to get out of his pyjamas and dressed for the day. The carrot was that I'd play with him when he was ready for the day. Despite that, the hours drifted by and he only got dressed when he was ready to go out late in the morning while I mentally checked off the moments that we were setting aside in exchange for a stand-off that may have ultimately been about redefining independence or influence over one's day.

As for Gabriel, he has made his expectations of me clearer and clearer. Whenever he makes an extended visit to the toilet he expects two books to be read to him, even if their length leaves his dangling legs asleep and piercing him with pins and needles before the second "happily ever after" is checked off. This morning I was in the middle of something far less important and he called out "I've been waiting," in his effort to nudge me to set things aside and read Charlie Brown while perched on the side of the bathtub.

For all the sense of transition that the day posed, it is a normal one where the poignant glimpses are too brief and too easily overlooked.  Instead, the negotiation between two wills becomes the highlight - the dramatic highlight stripped of any of the gentle sense of passage or childhood that came with those more photogenic moments. As he sits for a calm moment with his first-ever bowl of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream cooling his stomach, and I brace myself for the task of assessing the ROHSI (return on housespace investment) of the toys he doesn't think he's outgrown, I want to take a moment to attach the same appreciation of the moment as I have to seeing him become more expert with the camera. He's not growing up in every way at every moment, just a few ways at a time.