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The first year/year and a half of a baby’s life was all about physical development, amazingly quick growth, fine motor skills, from holding head up to sitting up to crawling to walking.

As Xi is 3 months past her 2nd birthday now, her language acquisition has been one of the most fascinating and fun things to behold. She is constantly practising her identification of objects (tree! car! blue balloon! train! airplane!), and in recent months, of emotions too (Kong Kong angry! She’s sad (when watching a movie)! Xi Xi scared! (an emotion she learnt the hard way during Halloween, and a million masks freaking her out)). Curiosity is now her main conversation item; it’s “what’s this, Mummy?” all day.

We are quickly moving on to funny stuff she says now. Remember that TV show a long time ago “Kids Say The Darndest Things“? Man, I loved that show. But we are entering that stage of daily Darndest Things now.

Case in point, yesterday morning, Xi was sitting on my bed while I was still in and out of sleep. Then she lifted her shirt and pointed to her belly and told me “Baby in there….baby’s sleeping, shhhh OK?”. I had been introducing to her my belly as her new sibling daily now, and I guess she now thinks that there is a baby in every belly!

How wonderful is it to be a parent, to re-discover discovery again.

Via Dooce, I found this wonderful post on the sublime joys of being a parent. I love it when someone writes my feelings in a far more eloquent way that my abilities allow me so I can copy and paste it in the blockquote box.

I would only say that my personal experience with parenthood has differed from Jeff’s. Mine has blessedly been 1% “incredible pain in the ass” and 99% “most sublime joy you’ve ever felt”, with that 1% “pain in the ass” portion 100% comprised of the MISERABLE HELL of first trimester pregnancy. You may think I’m exaggerating, but every single moment I have with my daughter has been the most sublime joy I’ve ever felt, every single bit. Beyond pregnancy (which I DETEST), there has been nothing I have found challenging…so far (major cavaet: I have just 26 months experience in parenthood. Let’s check in in oh, say 15 years). That whole difficult transition part I don’t get. The transition felt as easy as when I became no longer a swinging single but a significant other to my husband; it was all too obvious and too natural a progression. I have not felt my life has been terribly different than my life before parenthood, only significantly enhanced in beauty.

So here are the bits of Jeff’s post that I love and thoroughly agree with. Enjoy, fellow parents. Parts I loooove in bold. Warning: reading it might make you cry while you nod in agreement.

It’s difficult to explain children to people who don’t yet have children, because becoming a parent is an intensely personal experience. Every child is different. Every parent is different. Every culture has their own way of doing things. The experience is fundamentally different for every new parent in the world, yet children are the one universally shared thing that binds our giant collective chain letter of human beings together, regardless of nationality and language. How do you explain the unexplainable?

…Before Henry was born, I remembered Scott Hanselman writing this odd blurb about being a parent:

You think you love you wife when you marry her. Then you have a baby and you realize you’d throw your wife yourself under a bus to save your baby. You can’t love something more.

Nuts to that, I thought. Hanselman’s crazy. Well, obviously he doesn’t love his wife as much as I love mine. Sniff. Babies, whatever, sure, they’re super cute on calendars, just like puppies and kittens. Then I had a baby. And by God, he was right. I wouldn’t just throw myself under a bus for my baby, I’d happily throw my wife under that bus too – without the slightest hesitation. What the hell just happened to me?

As an adult, you may think you’ve roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You’ve loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.

You can’t possibly know the enormity of the feelings you will have for your children.

…When I am holding Henry and I tickle him, I can feel him laughing all the way to his toes. And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all. Here I am with this tiny, warm body so close to me, breathing so fast he can barely catch up, sharing his newfound joy of simply being alive with me. The sublime joy of this moment, and all the other milestones – the first smile, the first laugh, the first “dada” or “mama”, the first kiss, the first time you hold hands. The highs are so incredibly high that you’ll get vertigo and wonder if you can ever reach that feeling again. But you peak ever higher and higher, with dizzying regularity.

It’s also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What’s your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There’s no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

I wasn’t sure how to explain meeting new people to Henry, so I decided to just tell him we’ve met a new “friend” every time. Now, understand that this is not at all the way I view the world. I’m extremely wary of strangers, and of new people in general with their agendas and biases and opinions. I’ve been burned too many times. But Henry is open to every person he meets by default. Each new person is worth greeting, worth meeting as a new experience, as a fellow human being. Henry taught me, without even trying to, that I’ve been doing it all wrong. I realized that I’m afraid of other people, and it’s only my own fear preventing me from opening up, even a little, to new people that I meet. I really should view every new person I meet as a potential friend. I’m not quite there yet; it’s still a work in progress. But with Henry’s help, I think I can. I had absolutely no idea my child would end up teaching me as much as I’m teaching him.