Time and flying

When did it get to be November 12?

When did I get to have a four month old child?

They (the ubiquitous "they") always say that time flies when you get older, when you have a child. It's true. Unbelievably true.

Sometimes the days - and nights - seem to take forever. When I'm sitting beside my daughter, trying to entertain her with one hand while I try to hold the breast pump with the other, thinking of all the things I have to do - her laundry and my laundry and wash bottles and clean the kitchen and wash diapers and get groceries and and and - the moments seem long, endless, waiting for the next moment where I can catch five minutes and feel like a normal human being, a human being who has time to make a coffee or read a newspaper article or get a decent sleep or anything, anything at all that doesn't involve being called away, demanded upon from my (gorgeous) benevolent dictator.

And yet, I look around and suddenly, it's Thursday. Sunday was about 5 minutes ago, my baby was born last week. Wasn't she? I look at the bags of clothes she's already outgrown and think, did she ever fit in to these? I look at pictures from the summer and wonder, when was she ever that small?

I'm going to have to get careful, very careful, about not letting time slip by without noticing it. Every week, it seems, I have a panic attack about not documenting every moment of my daughter's life, every change. When did I last take pictures? What did I miss? I need to be writing this down! Because it does slip by, so quickly that you can't see it, and the business of every day makes me forget that there's so much I'm going to forget that I need to remember.

Little things, charming, beautiful things. Things like how she laughs like mad when a shirt is pulled over her head, or that when you put a book in front of her face her eyes widen like she's just spotted a buried treasure. Things like how it's impossible right now to clip her tiny fingernails and yet if I don't do it, she claws the heck out of her face, or how the dark brown hair she was born with is finally all gone, replaced by a fuzz of indeterminate colour. Or that she refuses to nap during the day for more than 20 minutes because she just doesn't want to miss anything and will not shut her eyes at night until the lights are switched off and there's nothing left to see.

These are the things I need to write down, capture on videotape or digital film or whatever, because these are the moments that make my heart melt. And heart meltage is hard to come by in this world.