I didn’t know very much about babies before my wife Jenny and I had one.
In fact, the two things I thought I knew (pregnancy begins with sex and babies take 9 months to grow) were immediately shut down on our first doctor’s visit (turns out pregnancy begins on the first day of the woman’s last period and a full-term baby is 39 to 40 weeks).
I wasn’t the best math student in high school but I definitely paid attention in sex ed and I was pretty sure the man had an active role in pregnancy.
Turns out we’re more like the cleanup batter than the lead hitter. I also don’t know much about baseball so I’m not sure if that’s a good analogy.
The math gets even more confusing with newborns.
It isn’t clear when to use weeks or months to track your child’s development. 8 seemed like a good stopping point for weeks but eventually 9 through 12 all worked their way into my conversations. Perhaps I stopped at 13 because of its unlucky reputation.
This replayed itself with months. My daughter Senita is almost 17 months old, but I don’t really know how long 17 months is without thinking about it. So I generally say she’s almost a year and a half. It’s all very complicated.
Days, I understand. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, that’s it: a full day. But nobody counts a child’s development in days.
Perhaps we should. With the exception of daylight savings, days don’t mess around like months with some having 30 hours while others have 31 hours and one goofball has only 28.
Days are a fair and universal metric that everyone understands. Which is why it struck me so powerfully when I realized that this past Thursday was my daughter’s 500th day since birth.
500 days sounds humongous. It is not. From Senita’s birthday, it was just 1 year, 4 months, and 14 days.
I don’t view each day as separate phenomena like notches on a belt or hash marks scratched on a prison wall, but rather as cumulative properties intensifying the others like adding a fresh coat of paint.
Physical Changes
500 days is enough time to look at pictures of your child’s earliest months and be surprised by how different she looked. The scarier part is being surprised at how different you look.
Mistakes are Made, Obstacles are Overcome
500 days is enough time for your child to have met obstacles, overcome them and encountered new ones. The same can be said of you as a parent.
We had a rocky patch transitioning Senita into eating food. She was underweight and the doctor told us to mix butter in with her food and we couldn’t understand why she was getting so irritated.
She did not have the typical rash-all-over symptoms so our doctor initially wrote off our allergy concerns until we insisted and eventually pinpointed Senita’s mild dairy allergy.
We now look back at the fall of 2019 as the time where we accidentally poisoned our baby with every meal. LOL, live and learn!
Personalities Emerge
Senita’s personality seems pretty well defined 500 days in and we’ve cycled through enough phases that the cycling itself is now routine. No need to call the priest when her head starts swiveling, it’s either teething or gas.
I’ve also discovered a new register within my voice that I use to authoritatively say “no” when my child is heading somewhere or touching something she shouldn’t. It isn’t a tone I’d use on anyone else and it is entirely ineffective, yet it keeps popping out of me every time my child gets near a toilet.
This is very different from the sound I make when there is actual danger or she gets a hold of my phone, which is much higher and panicky and will hopefully never be recorded by a prankster and posted on YouTube.
Routines Become Traditions
We mark the passage of a year with great fanfare but it is now, a few months past that point, where things really seem to have come together. Everything is no longer a first. We’re re-entering seasons and crystalizing routines into traditions.
One which I’m willing to share is that bubble parties are best at twilight after the sun has dipped below the tree line so we can enjoy the evening breeze without scurrying for shade. Bubbles are more magical in soft light.
The Path Gets Defined
500 days is enough to change the trajectory of your life and the foundation of your identity. Parenting’s novelty has worn off and the enormity of the task before you has set in.
At 500 days old, my daughter is 7.6% of the way to being an adult. This strikes me as crazy because I’m 220.3% of the way to being an adult and we both laugh at the same funny noises.
God willing, we’re still at the beginning of a long and winding parenting journey that will become a cornerstone to our lives. 500 days in seems like a good opportunity to appreciate how far we’ve come and ready ourselves for the many more ahead.
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