6 Months Old!

 Cooper is 6  months old today.  Six whole months.  Half of a year.

 I know I am getting older-- and it's not just the wrinkly skin on my chest and the aggressive gray hairs shooting silver through my bangs. It's that the days are long, and the weeks speed by, and I hear myself telling the boys it will be pool season before they know it-- because it will.  A blink and Memorial Day is upon us; another and the pool closes, boys shuffle up a grade, Cooper smashes a cake; another and we'll have our Christmas tree.

 Cooper might be teething.  He splashes puddles of drool on the floor in front of him and shoves anything he can grab in his mouth, pressing it against his gums.  You see that 6 month sticker on his shirt?  He ate the middle right out of it.  I salvaged the sides for his baby book.

 He loves Harry and Jack, watches them with wide eyes and a sharp face, quiets when they talk to him, beams that gummy grin that lights his face when Harry comes home from school.

 Today, he fussed while I cleaned up breakfast (at 10:30, 4 hours after we ATE breakfast), and Jack read hm an Eric Carle book, talking through the pictures and holding the pages for Cooper to touch.

 We celebrated 6 months by opening a few of Cooper's Christmas presents that we've had stuck in storage for months because he couldn't really use them.  We'll get them out when he can sit up, we said.

 Well.

 I love how supremely grossed out he looks here.

And how snuggly he is here, napping through dinner at our favorite taco place.  He woke up with a wheezing smile at the meal's end.

In a few minutes, I am going to slip into his dark room and gather his warm slumbering body from his crib to feed him before I go to bed-- dream feeding this is called-- in the hopes that he'll give me 5 or 6 uninterrupted hours.  He'll make snuffling noises and breathe a contented sigh when I lie him back down on his back.  When he wakes for food somewhere close to dawn, I will find him on his tummy, smashed into a corner, and his room will smell sweet and milky like sleep.

In the morning, I will pretend to eat his tummy, his toes, to wear him on my head like a hat and then that I can't find him up there, looking all around and calling his name while he laughs.  He'll eat some more, puke in my hair, have cereal with apples and prunes for breakfast, watch the big boys eat their bagels.  He'll nap, suck on things, chew his hands, nurse, fall asleep smashed up against Ben's side, doze off in his car seat, try to crawl, roll himself around the house, poop.  He has a busy day ahead, in other words

We're back to normal, you know.  A little more wrinkled and worse for the wear, a little more tired, sure.  Nowhere near getting a babysitter for all 3 of them.  But Cooper is easy now, a part  of us, so bound up in our routine, we can't remember how we ever lived without him. Life before Cooper was so long ago, a lifetime, really, that passed in slow days and fast weeks all of them steeped in baby, delicious baby.