Happy Birthday, Carter…

The other day I was going through Carter’s closet and tossing shirts that no longer fit, were missing buttons (I’m ashamed to admit I throw away shirts that are missing buttons) (stop judging me), and were covered with grass stains, and as I was going through the shirts lying on the floor of his closet and shaking them free of dust and dog hair (again, stop judging me) and attempting to hang them up again, I realized that the shirts that littered the floor of his closet were not there as a result of his laziness, but because his clothes no longer fit the small hangers I had been using for years. I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling as though time had hit me over the head with a frying pan as I folded outgrown t-shirts and carefully packed them in a cardboard box to be taken to the nearest consignment shop.

I find it hard to believe that it was ten years ago today that I called my mom in the middle of the night in a panic because I wasn’t sure if my water had broken or I had peed my pants.

“What if I wake up Mark and tell him I’m in labor and it turns out I HAD WET MY PANTS! I would DIE!”

The years since that day have passed by in a blur, and I often find myself wondering what happened to the little boy who would crawl into my lap asking me to read him a story and fall asleep before I had even finished the book. It seems like only yesterday that Carter, after watching me do a back handspring on the trampoline, stared at me with a look of awe and facination and spent the rest of the summer telling his friends, “Dude, my mom’s a Power Ranger!”.
It takes a lot more than a back handspring to impress him nowadays and unless I set myself on fire and baked brownies in the flames, I don’t think he’ll ever look at me again with such amazement the way he did that day in the backyard… he’s growing up, and even though I sometimes miss the little boy who used to empty his toybox and crawl inside to take a nap, I love the young man he’s becoming just as much as I loved the little boy he used to be.

Happy Birthday, Carter.