Firsts

I'm all about firsts lately. After going to a first birthday party for our good friend's daughter last week, I couldn't help but think about how much I've enjoyed watching her experience the first year of her life. I feel honored to have been part of it. I loved watching her grow from a mewing newborn to a hilarious little person. All this celebration (and exuberant cupcake not-quite-face-planting) made me think about our son Beckett's first year, and that we were already a quarter (actually, almost a third) of the way through it. How in a span of just a few months, how many firsts he's already had, and how many we have already forgotten. 

I'm not really good at the whole baby book thing. The keepsakes of Beckett's birth, the little hat they gave him to wear in the nursery, his social security card (complete with envelope - his first piece of mail!) are in a cardboard Ikea box in the closet of our den. The intention, of course, was to put them in some sort of album or scrapbook. But everything I've ever wanted to put in a scrapbook usually ends up in an old duty-free bag at the bottom of a closet. I'm sentimental until I have more important things to do, when a very organized, obsessive-compulsive, label-making demon possesses me. Then the plastic duty-free bag with the ticket stubs from our trip to Thailand ends up in the trash.

So despite the fact that I never intended to start a blog, I've started one. I hope that our family and friends will check it periodically. Even more so, I hope that I will maintain it properly. Because it is really for our son Beckett, who despite being the star of the show, won't remember being in it.

He won't remember the first time he dipped his feet into the Gulf of Mexico, and the feeling of the sand between his toes. He won't remember that at a little diner in Saratoga Springs, while we ate breakfast with our good friends Jessica and Jon, he brought his hands together for the first time. He won't remember that just that night, he found his left foot with his left hand, and how his father was convinced (until he found his right foot with his right hand) that he was left-handed. Or meeting his great-grandfather in Newport, and how he gazed up at him with such adoration that everybody in the room simultaneously cooed with delight.

To Beckett, I hope you enjoy these firsts as much as we will.