Westley will be 18 months old in less than a week. He's a big, tall man. I'm struck by his bigness on a daily basis, lifting him out of his crib, holding him across my body to nurse, balancing him on my hip. Trying to get him dressed is like juggling a Jell-O-coated Slinky, feeding his muscly octopus arms through sleeves while he thrashes and flails. All of his pants are real pants now--no snaps up the inseams for easy diaper changes--and his T-shirts are vaguely T-shirt-sized.
Rob calls Westley "the littlest of boys," which first referred to his tiny baby self. "We've got a boy!" I said, looking at him for the first time. But how could any boy be so incredibly small? Now he's the littlest of boys in a different sense: no longer a baby, all grown up, a boy.
But as I moved some things around on my side of the bedroom this evening--not really tidying up, but arranging things into piles--I found Westley's shoes mixed in with mine. And I was suddenly overwhelmed by his smallness. It didn't seem possible that there was a person in my house whose feet matched up with those shoes. He's not a baby any more, but one of his shoes still fits neatly in the palm of my hand.
My feet are are foot-sized; Westley's are little.
