Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

okay. mark this day, friends. i have officially turned into that blue-haired biddy i warned myself about six months or so ago.

it’s all going by too fast. waaaaay too fast. and i’m starting to say it out loud, to everyone i meet. let me say it to you, officially…and you can repeat after me. it all goes by so fast! insert maternal wailing and gnashing of teeth here, for good measure.

Oscar is nine months old today. he’s been around, a breathing, feeding, squalling little bundle, for a whole month longer than i was even pregnant with him (he came at 36 weeks). it shouldn’t surprise me, then, that he’s made some progress in these nine months…in merely eight he went from being an egg and sperm on a blind date to a six pound infant, after all. but still. i woke up this morning and realized that my baby has turned into a boy. a full-fledged, mobile, kinda communicating, cute-as-all-hell little boy.

this shouldn’t be such a shock, i suppose…this boy epiphany. it’s not that i was suffering from any kind of gender dysphoria on his behalf…he’s always been a boy, straight from the sixteen-week u/s at which he flaunted himself like a Chippendale’s auditionee, and he has the requisite blue Pooh sleepers and manly brown baby blankies to prove it.

but he has been a baby boy.

and i wasn’t ready to see the “baby” part of the description fade so fast…but already i can see it pulling away from us, riding off into the sunset. now, suddenly, astoundingly fast, Oscar’s turning into a little person. every day he does something new, discovers something new, delights in something new. i look across the room at him and my jaw drops, because a little boy is sitting there, astride his ride-on car, laughing and trying to pull the cat’s tail. he blows me away…all this, already?

my own shock has led me to hatch a new theory about why mothers tend to think their children are geniuses. we’re not ready to let go. so when our little ones begin to launch themselves away from us, and creep and crawl pell-mell towards the big wide world, we’re sure it must be them who are advanced, not us who are chickenshits.

i am a big chickenshit, indubitably. i love watching him flower, this beautiful boy child whom my baby is becoming…but it strikes terror into me too. some part of my heart that wants to hold him like this, safe and innocent and snuggly, just a little longer.  a lot longer.

world, be kind.

and you mothers of newborns and mothers-to-be, consider yourself warned: the biddies are right. it goes by way too fast. :)