Overwhelming Sappiness

I don't know what it is, but every so often I'll look at Patrick and be completely astonished at how much I love him. It's like that love hits me like a brick, threatening to knock me over and stealing my breath away. I notice it most often when I see him sleeping each night when I creep into his room to give him his medicine. He usually hears the creak of the door as I open it and stretches his legs out as far as they'll go and sometimes rolls over. That sleepy, eyes-still-closed look catches me off guard every night. I just want to snatch him up into my arms and let him snuggle into me until he dozes back off. Of course I don't. I instead give him his medicine as quickly and painlessly as possible and leave him to sleep on his own. I move the corner of his favorite blanket back into the crook of his arm so he can immediately roll over and snuggle his face into it (don't worry, he doesn't stay sleeping that way). Somehow that snuggle into the blanket becomes too much for me and I have to retreat quickly. That's the moment I'm the most afraid I'll give in to temptation and pick him up.

There are times I'll wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what woke me up. I hope in those still moments of night that I'll hear a sleepy cry or coo from the other room, that I will hear that Patrick needs me. I'll jump at any excuse to spend just a few minutes holding him when I wasn't expecting to. Unlike his first few months at home, I am eager to jump out of bed at even my sleepiest to attend to his needs. I wonder when that changed. Could it be that when he stopped needing me quite as much, I found I needed him instead?

Ok, enough sappiness. Lately Patrick has been spending more time in his rocker chair than he has had since his first few days home from the hospital. I glanced over at him in his chair the other day and was struck with how well he fills up the chair. I can still remember not bothering to strap him in because the front flap came up to his armpits, and needing the preemie headrest behind him and still worrying about his poor neck because it didn't fit tightly enough around his tiny head.
Even with the headrest thing, he doesn't come up all the way to the cow. I remember thinking how big he was then. My point of reference was that three-pound birth weight, though.

Look at him now:
You can't even see the cow anymore. He may not have caught up to the charts yet, but he has definitely grown! Incidentally, doesn't it look like he's saying, "Mom, it was this big!"
Something about his look the other night made me suddenly think of him more as a little boy and less of a baby, and I was trying to capture that on camera. I think it was a combination of the unruly hair (that finally escaped from the "church hair" combover) and the expressions on his face. It's finally starting to sink in that in a few months he really will turn one year old. Around the same time, he will graduate from being a baby/infant to a toddler. He really will have that little boy look by then and my baby will only exist in photos from that point on.

Oops, I fell back into the sappiness. I guess I'm just in a sappy mood today. Ok, one quick funny story. Patrick was playing in his gym on the floor when Matt got home for lunch today. He could see the door into our garage from his position on the floor. The second Matt walked in, Patrick looked over towards him and grinned from ear to ear. He recognized Daddy before Daddy ever said a word. That's particularly impressive because Matt got a haircut yesterday. Yes, that's right; all the curls are gone. I don't know that I would have recognized Matt at first if I hadn't known he was planning to get a haircut. I think it's sweet that Patrick still recognized his Daddy so easily, crazy hair or not.