we will be wild like children once the black has veiled this sky

I haven't been around here, on the blog, for some time. I hate when that happens and then I'm always left feeling overwhelmed and like there's so much to catch up on, so much I wanted to post about, so many things that have happened that seemed worth mentioning. I'm always feeling overwhelmed, really, though I guess it's easy to feel such when you're a parent. There are always so many things and so little time. Imagine my horror when on Friday afternoon my mother suggested I was sick after I'd been complaining of freezing to the point of teeth-chattering while everyone else was warm. Sick? I'm not sick! I don't feel sick. I can't be sick. 102.6 later, well, you know the drill. And that whole bit about not feeling sick? It ended really quickly. My husband says I spent all of Friday night hallucinating like a lunatic while burning up and by Saturday morning I was begging to go to the emergency room. Ugh. But every once in a while there's some sparkle of good in the bad, like the fact that my uncle is an emergency room physician and was on call during my stay to take care of me, alleviating most of my nerves while I spent the bulk of Saturday in a hospital bed by myself so my mother could take care of Ethan while my husband had to go into work. It turns out that the hospital stay was the easy part, that juggling feeling so awfully sick you're convinced your head is going to fall clear off while simultaneously chasing after a precocious toddler is rather difficult. By today I'm feeling life like -- I'd even venture to say better -- minus some lingering congestion. This would be well and good minus the fact that I had to drown myself in mom guilt for sabotaging Ethan's Easter. He'd just been so excited for "the bunny" to come, so excited to dye eggs and find eggs and eat bunny shaped pancakes that I promised him I'd make and this was all I could think about as I sat in bed clutching my puke bucket. Long story short, our Easter bunny got a little delayed and he'll be making his visit to Ethan's house this coming Sunday, bunny shaped pancakes and all.

But, no, all problems are not so easily solved. It's a rule of the universe that when a mommy is sick as a mommy can possibly be, the whole essence of life just sort of shifts. Like the fact that while I was zonked out in bed at 4 a.m. trying to rest some life back into my body, my husband watched Ethan leap out of his crib on the video monitor. Effortlessly, he tells me, despite the fact he's had no interest or even shown an attempt to do so before. It was like one night he just didn't want to be in his crib anymore and so he vacated, like he knew how all along but just couldn't be bothered. Until now. Which left me with tissues shoved up my nostrils crying about how everything was going to be horrible and no one would ever sleep again and cue the apocalypse because he's not even two years old yet and ohmygosh I don't have time to be so sick. So we attached all furniture to the wall, put locks on all of the door handles for the rooms down the hall, converted Ethan's crib into a toddler bed and waited for the worst.

But the worst didn't happen.

It turns out, he absolutely loves his big boy bed. And, more than anything, he slept the entire night. This is epic not just because it was his first night in a new bed with an easy out, but because Ethan doesn't sleep through the night. He doesn't really sleep. Naps were gone, sleep at night was broken and not without incessant, unrelenting crying and fighting. With the big boy bed, he laid his head on the pillow and went to sleep for the entire night. This afternoon, he napped for almost two hours. Tonight? You guessed it: tonight he laid there and then went to sleep like he's been doing this his whole life.

My husband and I are afraid to jinx anything. We were sure the big boy bed was a curse. I'd called Ethan's pediatrician the morning after he escaped his crib for transition advice, wanting to just beg her to forbid the change because I wasn't ready. We weren't ready. But, really, it looks like we were.

Suddenly, I have a big boy.

It's hard to believe that it's already April and that in June, Ethan will turn two. He loves telling everyone how old he's going to be -- a burst of "TWO!" with such enthusiasm that I laugh every time -- and what theme his birthday is. "George!"

If I step back, it becomes a little more apparent, all this talk of my baby becoming a big boy seemingly overnight. These days, we can have conversations with each other and it's become so commonplace that it takes me a minute to step back and realize that the days of infancy are gone. While so much stays the same -- he still asks for a second helping of vegetables each night at dinner, which he certainly didn't inherit from me -- so much manages to change. Subtle but swift changes are happening under our nose each day, every day. I blinked, and then I had a big boy. A big boy, sleeping soundly in his big boy bed inside a room still filled with the anticipation of bringing home our newborn boy.