Hanging on and moving forward

When you have one child, every first is also your last. You may not know it at the time. You may hope desperately for seconds. You may not get them. 

And so your first “terrible twos” or “fucking fours” will be all you get. Your last baby words – the ones that hang on after all the others go by the wayside – will really be your last. 

That could motivate you, as it does me, to not correct the pronunciation errors or grammar mistakes. They’re just so damn cute, and they won’t come around again. 

So, no, I’m not correcting my son when when he says, “you have to be be careful,” because I love that he thinks ‘be careful’ is like its own word. And I don’t want to tell him the word is tent, not stent. It’s cuter his way. It’s his last vestiges of his toddler-ness, his learning to communicate like a big boy. And I’m hanging on to each moment because they will be the last.