10 Years: Where Did A Decade Go?

He's turning 10 today.  How in hell did that happen?  He's just a couple inches shorter than me (although I am pretty short) and his feet are the same size as mine (only narrower).  Somehow a decade has flown by and I can barely wrap my head around it.  I some ways I can hardly remember when he was born; in others it seems like he should still be a baby.  It's a question I know so many parents ask:  Where did the time go?

Time has dimmed my memory, but I kept a record of my son's first year in a daily diary.  So no matter how much I forget from those early days, I can always look back and will never completely lose that time.

I think much is lost due to the lack of sleep.  I can barely remember much of anything from that first year.  Some of my first year memories revolve around sleep.  I remember taking the boy to the shore for the first time. (Husband stayed home for the weekend to get some much needed sleep.  He was the stay at home dad, while I was out working.  How did I ever manage to work full time?) I was a wreck driving.  (Buying a mirror that fit over the back of the driver's seat so that I could keep an eye on our son via the rearview mirror was an immediate priority after that first "long" solo drive.)  Our son was only about a month old at this point and I remember waking up in the middle of the night to feed him only to find that my mother was already up and he was contentedly sucking on a bottle.  She told me to go back to bed and I gratefully did.

I remember the first time he slept for more than 3 hours at a clip.  I had pre-made a bottle that was ready to go for the 2 o'clock feeding and all of a sudden it was 4 o'clock.  Two extra hours of sleep were heaven.

Sleeping and feeding; isn't that what most babies do?  Watching him sleep is what I remember doing for the first few days; first in the hospital and then in the Holiday Inn.  Making bottles in the bathroom at the Holiday Inn and my husband would feed him while Ursula Andress emerged from the sea on TV.  (There was a James Bond marathon that week and it seemed no matter what time we turned on the television it was always Dr. No and always at the same spot in the movie where she climbs out of the ocean in the famous bikini.)

And then there was the long drive home with only one break to change and feed him.  What we must have looked like in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express.  (I think it was the Holiday Inn Express in New Milford, but I can't be sure.  I just remember sitting in a lobby area watching the Today Show.)  And then of course feeding him again once we got home 2-1/2 hours later; only to have him spit up on me immediately thereafter.  (Nothing like the smell of regurgitated Similac on a hot summer day.)

I remember feeding him "solids" for the first time on January 2, 2006.  (A date I specifically picked because I knew the doctor's office would be open if we had any type of problem.)  How "solid" rice cereal made mostly of Similac was is another story.  Although we were getting more sleep at this point, I look at the photos I took that day and I still see two weary parents.

From birth he was a picky eater.  I worried because he never took a full bottle.  (Perhaps this was an eating habit that I should have picked up.)  When we moved on to solids he only liked certain jarred foods.  Sweet potato and carrots were two favorites and he ate so many of them that he actually started to turn a little orange/yellow.  (Which resulted in a blood test; something I'd rather forget.)  Then I couldn't get him past "stage two" jarred food.  The chunkier "stage 3" he would gag on and spit out.  I swore that he would go to kindergarten with jars of baby food.  

Today he is ten.  He sleeps well.  (He is beginning to get into the teenage mode of staying up later and sleeping in later.)  He eats solid food; although the solids of his choice are pizza, hot dogs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spaghetti, red velvet cake and sour patch kids.  He is entering his "tween" years and middle school.  Where did the decade go?  And what is to come in the next decade?