What A Difference A Year Makes!

Back in July, I commented about how the horses and their foals had been put out to pasture in an area near to where I work. The young foals were testing their legs and would prance around their mothers full of energy.

Well, I suppose the attempted analogy has now become rather obvious.  Our little foal is bustling around his parents on all fours and getting into all kinds of new trouble here in our little pasture.  So much of the first months of his life were about the basics; eat, sleep, diaper-change. Within only a few weeks, he took his 6+ months of passiveness and decided that it's time to move - and really move, at that.

Just under a month ago, he began to make the first motions towards crawling forward.  As he has caught on, it has meant a new form of "babywatch" as he now motors around the apartment. Not to be content with just crawling, he has added the pull-myself-up-on-anything and -everything feature to his repertoire, so long as it doesn't fall back on him first.  All and anything is acceptable to be chewed on, so long as he can get his mouth around it.  It takes a new kind of awareness and endurance to keep up with him.


Actually, these strides seem all the more monumentus today in particular due to a rather special anniversary.  It was one year ago that we were at Akademiska hospital in Uppsala for an ultrasound.  

When I post a blog update, I tend to be cautious about using too much hyperbole and/or clichés.  We are not the first people to experience the development of a baby.  It is just simply that at particular intervals we recognize how very drastic the change has been.  To look in a mirror and compare our own reflection with that of one year ago would show few overt differences.  Conversely, to put a black and white ultrasound picture side-by-side with this little boisterous boy says volumes.

To now be cliché and sing "what a difference a year makes..." or use superlatives such as "Christopher is a talented boy, taking brilliant new strides at a phenomonal pace"... or to blankly say, "he crawls, he laughs, he is a happy boy" are all the same.  Instead, the better picture to illustrate is that it is in fact we, the parents, as the metaphorical mother horse.   We are close behind our little foal, with a gleem of pride and an eye out for danger, as he bounces, plays and discovers his world.