Adventures in parenting, Part 3: Time flies

My wife and I sent our boys off to sleepover camp last week, and while we’re excited to have 3-1/2 weeks of kid-free alone time, the house is eerily quiet without them.

I woke up the other day thinking about how quickly time passes when you’re busy doing stuff like working, raising kids, making meals and doing laundry. For some reason, I thought about the piece below, which I wrote in 1998 when my eldest son was not even one year old. (It appeared in a slightly different form in the Ryersonian, the newspaper of Ryerson University’s journalism program.)

The baby in this little vignette – which I recently unearthed on an old 3.5-inch floppy disk buried on a shelf in our home office – is now a 5-8, 150-pound 14-year-old.

As I type this, he’s probably on a four-day camping trip in Algonquin Park with his bunkmates.

It almost makes me cry just thinking back to when he was just a little thing on my shoulder.

So, sure, my wife and I are having fun being kidless for a while, but we really do miss our guys, and we miss the smaller versions of themselves that they used to be even more.

*   *   *

A cry in the dark.

It’s 3:30 a.m., and Nathan, my six-month-old son, is awake in his crib. He’s quickly progressed from quiet play to a shrieking wail, punctuated by periodic yelps for “Maah-Maah.”

He doesn’t need to nurse. He wakes out of newly acquired habit. His second cold in less than two months has cured him of sleeping through the night.

I hear all, but I feign sleep.

My wife pokes me until, with a mumbled grunt, I acknowledge that I’m awake. Deciding that this is a daddy job, she commands me to “Deal with the baby.”

As I groggily take to my feet, I have an out-of-body experience, as if I’m looking down on the scene from above, thinking “Holy shit! Yesterday, I was just a pimply faced 16-year-old.”

I stumble down the hall.
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When I pick him up, Nathan does a double-take and gives me a disappointed look. Mine is clearly not the face he wants to see.

His cry is by now an exhausted whimper, but he still wants “Maah-Maah.”

I sling him onto my shoulder, rest his head on my neck and start my usual rhythmic dance around his room. Hips rotating for maximum sleep-inducing effect, I chant “What’s that? A Mississippi cat” for what seems like hours.

At that moment, I can’t wait for him to grow up.

As Nathan’s little body grows limp on my shoulder, my mind wanders.

I recall Friday nights when I actually was a pimply faced 16-year-old. My maternal grandparents would visit every week for dinner, arriving loaded down with plastic bags full of bulk jujubes, jelly beans, pistachio nuts and chocolate.

After dinner, my seven-year-old little sister, now 21, would saw away at Bach on the violin, and my grandfather would laugh uncontrollably at how cute she looked (and how terrible she sounded). My mom and my grandmother would play their usual three-hour game of Scrabble.

And, as soon as I could make my getaway, I’d join my friend Ted in our weekly jaunt to Sara Urowitz’s house to flirt with Sara and her little sister.

As I sway back and forth, I miss my grandparents.

Lost in thought, I hardly notice that Nathan is fast asleep.

Normally, I’d put him down right away and tip-toe back to bed. Tonight, though, I squeeze him tight.

“You can cry all night, Nathan,” I think to myself, as tears stream down my cheek.