Baby Giggles

"That's the most beautiful sound I ever heard!"

-Denise

Mmmm......I Want More!

Jackson had his first solid food tonight, rice cereal with lots of milk.

It was a big hit....once he got used to the idea.

"Your feeding me what?

"Hmmm......"

"Oh, I get it.....this is pretty tasty!"

"More please!!!!!"

Jackson's 1st Christmas

Here are a few of the pictures from Jackson's first Christmas

at Granma and Granpa Cochran's House.

Opening his first stocking.

Check out all the loot!

(Thanks Everyone!)

Hanging out with Dad.

Playing with the cousins.

Watch out, he'll be crawling soon!

All tuckered out from the big day!

Waiting

It seems that my whole life, I've been anxiously waiting for something. I remember counting down the days until graduation from high school. Waiting for the first day of college and moving off to Chicago, then marking off days on the calendar until I could get the heck out of Illinois. The wait to marry Denise was a particularly long one, as I recall. And most recently, we were both pretty anxious for early September to roll around this year.

I've just been waiting and waiting and waiting for 26 years. Watching the clock and counting the days, with something bigger and newer and more exciting just around the corner. Older people like to tell you how quickly time flies, but for me, it never flew. It always crawled toward a much-anticipated horizon.

The past few months have been the first I've ever felt like time was passing by me too quickly. Every day when I come home from work, Jackson is doing something new. He can laugh! He can put stuff in his mouth! He can make a baby pterodactyl sound!

Christmas this year was a blur of tinsel and diapers. It seems like we just put up the tree last week, and today we're taking it down. The ornaments are still cold from sitting in storage, and already it's time to box them up and put them away for another year. When I was kid, I remember the gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas seeming to take about a decade to pass. Now Jackson's first Christmas is over in what seemed like about 5 hours.

Jackson is 4 months old, for crying out loud. He's twice as big as the day we brought him home from the hospital. Our tiny newborn is gone, and in his place we've got a regular baby!

That's the part that gets to me the most; the sense that our 7-pound infant is somehow gone forever. Jackson will never be that small again. He'll never again sleep in Dad's cradle. Even my days of feeding him a bottle are numbered.

It's strange to say, but there's a certain sense of loss about it. For once, all those geezers telling you to "enjoy these moments while you can" are actually making sense.

I am trying to be mindful of the moments that I have. I'm trying to do only one thing at a time. When I'm at home, I make sure that I'm actually at home and not still mentally stuck at the office or at school. The days and hours are precious, because all of a sudden they are rushing by awfully fast!