I’m totally a follower.

This picture pretty much sums up the best parts of parenthood.  To me.  This little human that did not exist a couple of years ago is now here, forging ahead in the world with two fools yoked to him by the palpable but invisible threads (ropes! irons!) of love, following his every move and grinning the whole time.  That moment up there?  That is definitely what I signed up for.  This time last year I was in the lead, (I mean who am I kidding?  Asher was still the boss, but I was in the lead…) as I nursed and soothed a one-month-old out of the safety of the womb and into the swirl of the world.  Drew was…I can’t even think of the right word for it…amazing doesn’t really do Drew justice, especially in those early months, but amazing does begin to touch on it, and together we were slowly exposing Asher to the little gentle glories of the world like soothing baths and eyelid kisses and snowflakes .  But now.  Look at this guy!  He’s showing us everything.  We just follow and laugh and maintain the illusion that the world doesn’t have anything sharp or poisonous or (electrically) shocking in it, and every day we get to bear witness to what a wild place this really is.  Can you imagine every day being the biggest and most important of your life?  It seems to me that it’s really like that for an infant, and to top it off, that awe-inspiring mentality is coupled with a complete and total lack of inhibition.  Nudie Booty Party!

When people repeatedly tell you that having a child changes everything, it inevitably comes across like a warning.  But I have to get a little smug here and say, if we hadn’t changed everything, we never would have found out what we were missing, you know?  And I’m not just talking about finding out about wild true love, I’m talking about rediscovering blades of grass, noticing every insect within a 16 foot radius, imagining what it’s like to taste an avocado for the very first time, beginning to think that it doesn’t seem that crazy to not only smell and look at everything you discover, but maybe lick it and taste it too.  Giving birth to a child isn’t just introducing a new life to the world, it’s getting introduced to a whole new aspect of the world.  It’s a daily reminder that we don’t know everything (what?) and that there is still so so so much left to see. Ahh geeze…this is what I get for getting all sentimental…one of my contacts just fell out.  No Joke.  What was that I was just saying about so much world to see?  Ohhhhhhhhhhhh the irony.  Well in closing I’ll just say that I’m glad that we decided to change everything.  Really, really glad.

photo by Tom Daly