Milestone Mama

As I stood wiping the changing table with Milton fluid, a little voice I hadn’t heard before broke the silence in the Winnie the Pooh nursery;  "Ma-Ma". I turned on my heels and looked into the cot where my little 8 month old boy had been taking his afternoon sabbatical - I call it this as he never sleeps during the day, just what I would call resting his weary eyes.

As you know already from my blog, my little lad is a 12 hour a night sleeper so rarely sleeps during the day. Yesterday was just another normal day.  I had placed him in the cot 10 minutes earlier when his eyes had got heavy, his breathing became shallow and when he let out a little snore I quietly relished the opportunity to grab this precious 10 minutes to catch up on folding his clean clothes and blankets.

"Ma-Ma" again, a second time and the little arms reaching out for me from the cot.

I’m not an overly emotional person and so far in his short 8 months I have managed to keep reasonably composed over his developmental progress. I know some new mothers who break out the Kleenex at the sight of a new patch of hair or a different coloured number two in a nappy.

As the tears streamed down my face and I lifted him out of the cot I knew this was the start of a new era in his infancy.

It had started with a "ba ba ba ba ba " babbling a few days earlier. That was when the bets were placed. For those that know us, myself and my partner are consistently competitive; from everything to cooking to who drives best (obviously - I do). Our child was no exception to the competitive madness - even in the womb - I said boy, he said girl (I won that one again obviously). He said it would be da da to be the first and now the results are in. I won again, normality has been resumed and for the first time it doesn’t really matter who won.

There are no winners at moments like these, just sheer joy and elation that the little person you brought into the world is maturing at lightening speed.

Woke up this morning and there I find daddy saying "repeat after me"... "da da da da da da".