Yesterday the family visited the zoo to celebrate our son’s first birthday. Everyone had a lot of fun making memories feeding giraffes and checking out all the animals. Based on the laughter, smiles, and wonder at seeing these exotic animals in real life, it’s safe to assume he enjoyed the experience.
It’s a bittersweet thing seeing them grow up. Unless time travel is invented before I die, I won’t be able to get that time back. I won’t get to experience his first time crawling again. Never again will I get to see that first smile or laugh. But it’s an amazing thing watching them grow.
I am in awe of how far he has come in the past year, and feel incredibly lucky to be witness to it all. He has such a personality now, and we can really start to see him as an individual develop. Music makes him dance seemingly involuntarily, his big sister makes him smile and laugh, and he loves being silly trying to get us to chase him around.
Things like that are never really apparent from day to day, in the moment, and I couldn’t tell you when those behaviors started. But thinking back over the past year I’ve seen an amazing transformation from this tiny human who didn’t do much to this little buddy of mine who is really fun to be around. The memories (and the increasing number of photos) is all we have of those precious moments past.
Dan Hauk 