Happy Half Birthday, Ben!

Dear Ben,

In the last few days, I began the downhill slide out of my twenties, and you began the downhill slide toward being one.  I still remember when my own crazy mother sent me to school wearing an "It's My Half Birthday" ribbon when I was in kindergarten, so I deemed it necessary to acknowledge your first half-birthday in some official capacity.  Fortunately, your half-birthday is very close to my actual birthday, so we were able to celebrate with a half-eaten cake topped with half-melted candles.

 Well, your Daddy and I celebrated that way.  You celebrated with applesauce, the very first fruit ever to grace your sweet little taste buds.  You're much too young to realize that applesauce is a sorry substitute for cake, so you enjoyed it thoroughly.

You also got to play with a cool new toy, which the kind UPS man happened to deliver on the very day you turned half a year old.  Even though playing with toys is not a new trick for you anymore, I'm still amazed that you can do it.  Your fascination with the world in general is really fun to watch.  I understand how you feel, though, because I'm pretty fascinated by everything about you.  I don't think I've quite gotten over the fact that you exist yet.  Just tonight, I was getting you ready to take a bath, and you were laughing and babbling, and I was taken aback by the fact that you are a full-on person with stuff going on in your brain and the beginnings of a personality coming through.  And it is so very wonderful to get to know you while you're in the process of becoming you.

You've come a long way, baby, since the day I first met you.  For one thing, you've gained over ten pounds in the last six months -- a feat I didn't accomplish until my freshman year of college.  It's hard for me to believe that you were ever small enough to live inside me.  You're figuring out how to handle that big ol' sixteen-pound body of yours these days, too.  Just in the last week, you've started to get pretty good at sitting up.  Fortunately for me, you're still small enough that I can make you snuggle with me while I rock you to sleep.  I can already tell when I look at your squishy sleeping face in my arms that I'm going to miss those sweet moments soon.

A few months before you were born, I was struck by a verse from the song "In Christ Alone" that says, "From life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny."  It seemed really neat to me at the time that I would know you from your very first cry.  And that part is definitely still incredible to me.  But now, six months out from that first cry, it's the rest of that line that gets me.  I like to think that I have some control over what you do, but you are a full-on person.  So whether my parenting is perfect or not (it's not), a lot of your life now and a whole lot of your life in the future is out of my hands.  What a blessing it is that you are securely held in the hands of a perfect Father.

Happy half birthday, baby boy!