One of the benefits of having a brilliant wife is that planning for the future happens without any effort. I’m not a big planner. I have to plan some things of course, but generally speaking, my wife is in charge when it comes to planning. Way back before our son was born my wife was on the path to convince me (really just bring me to her side) concerning a relatively expensive crib. “Why is it so expensive,” I would ask. The answer was, of course, that we’d get a lot of use out of it. Sure enough, we have been.
The first magic change the crib performed was lowering the mattress so that our newly standing child wouldn’t get confused and fall over the railings. This was a welcome change. I just unscrewed some screws here, carefully lowered a metal piece there, and all of a sudden the bed was fit for a child who could stand up on their own. Magic! After our big move, however, my wife wanted to make another change. Sure enough, the bed (yet again!) did something I didn’t expect. It turns out that this bed will also turn into a sort of day bed, where the front piece comes off completely. This allows our son to — have you guessed yet? — put himself to bed! He doesn’t yet do this, but the ability to actually lie down on his own is really cool. The first time we put him down to take a nap in his newly “big boy’ed” crib I did a double-take. He’d grown so much. Everyone says “they grow up so fast,” but I never really knew what that meant. I do now. They do grow fast. Too fast. Another realization I had at a sister-in-law’s high school graduation party — in sixteen years we’ll be hosting one of these for our baby boy. Say it with me: too fast!