i'll try to explain

I was not expecting to be so charmed by the minutiae of infancy. I mean, he's small and that's cute, and I get that. But watching his eyelashes grow little by little? Noticing that he stares just a second longer at the green frog dangling from his play gym? I'm fascinated. I could launch an entire blog just about the shapes his belly button has gone through in the past few weeks.

I think this is why it's so hard to explain what being a new parent is like to our friends who don't have kids. In conversation, it's the big, obvious things -- the negative things -- that get discussed: He kept us up all night; he wants to nurse all the time; we're so exhausted. Or else, it's the funny-but-poor-us stories that we tell -- like how he woke us up with his cries at 3 a.m. the other night, and how, when I went to pick him up, I realized that he had somehow worked his diaper down in his sleep, and then crapped. All over himself. And the blanket. And the bassinet sheet.

"That sucks," my friends respond.

But the thing is, it doesn't. Not at all. Because when I picked him up that night, he opened his eyes, looked at me, and smiled. Not a big smile, just a quick moment of recognition and then back to crying.

That may seem like a small thing in comparison to standing in the dark with shit on one hand and a crying infant in the other at three in the morning. And when the story gets told in the following days, it's the exasperation of the whole scene that gets the most attention. But secretly, I loved every minute it took to clean that kid up that night.