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It’s been a big week for growing up in the Jake-and-Lily household. And, not surprisingly, I have mixed feelings about it.

First, Lily received glowing reviews of her first afternoon in daycare yesterday and spent last night and this morning grinning and babbling at me.  Plainly, she approves.  Or so I am telling myself as I shift anxiously in my seat pretending I’m totally okay with leaving her for her second day.  (Has the novelty worn off?  Will she be able to successfully communicate her dislike of the play mat on which I fear she will be left when the caregivers necessarily have to tend to other babies than mine? Just how much does she cry when set off by those other kids who, with several months on her, really ought to be old enough to control their emotions?)

Then — perhaps as a reaction to the news that his baby sister is now attending the same “school” he used to go to — Jake announced this morning that he wished to sit on the potty.  And peed in it.

Jake’s Potty Primer

I’m sad to say I did not witness the Big Event firsthand.  I didn’t have any reason to think that the unusual request to sit on the potty first thing in the morning would lead anywhere beyond, well, sitting on the potty.  Which in and of itself is a pretty big deal in our house, especially if Jake will consent to do it diaper-less.

So, after answering affirmatively to Jake’s query, “You’ll come downstairs with me in a little while?” I settled in to feed Lily.  Before she finished, Jake and his dad were back, grins on both their faces and a pile of stickers in Mike’s hand.

“Tell Mommy what you did,” Mike urged Jake.

“Sat on the potty!” Jake crowed.  The information was incomplete, but my sharp Mama instinct told me something more monumental had happened.

“What did you do in the potty?” Mike asked suggestively.

Jake looked confused.

“Did you pee in the potty?” Mike said by way of a subtle hint.

“I peed in the potty!” Jake exclaimed.  I wouldn’t have thought he could smile any more broadly, until I broke into excited congratulations and his sweet cheeks looked as if they would split with pleasure.

“You get FOUR stickers!” his proud papa told him.  That’s double the number he gets for just sitting on the potty reading books about potty training with me.

I must admit with a small amount of shame that the stickers I bought as a reward for Jake’s bathroom prowess are a bit lame.  Nothing to stir a toddler’s heart like “JOB WELL DONE!” with a big fat smiley face.  No gold stars or construction trucks or sports balls.  Just fish.

More than just fish, actually.  The stickers are an underwater theme I picked up at Staples when I was buying computer paper.  Probably not the place most people shop for toddler rewards, but how was I to know that the fat pack of something like 100 stickers for 99 cents was actually a sheet of the same 20 or so visible through the shrink wrap repeated over and over again?  Besides, they include two sharks, which are particularly popular, and a couple of whales that will do in a pinch.

At any rate, Jake seemed to feel not the least bit gypped as he and Mike hunted out four shark stickers.

Then he noticed the single sheet of sparkly stickers he received in the otherwise entirely unsuccessful Easter egg hunt at the Biltmore Estate.  “I want a bunny,” he proclaimed.

“You already have four stickers,” Mike pointed out.

“I think he deserves a sparkly one,” I admonished, breaking the cardinal rule of never, ever saying anything that sounds the least bit like you are disagreeing with the rules laid down by your child’s other parent.

But this was a big day, and Mike not only acquiesced and let Jake choose a bunny, he let him pick out two bunnies.

“Sharks and bunnies,” he said, surveying the collection on Jake’s shirt.

And in those sharks and bunnies lies the emotional conflict of watching your small children accomplish big things.  On the one hand, you celebrate their growing independence, which, goodness knows, sometimes can’t come soon enough.  One day, you think, they will hunt on their own, fend for themselves, and let me sleep in late on the weekends.

But then there’s the other hand, the one that wants them to go on being sweet baby bunnies that you can cuddle in your arms pretty much forever.

When Change Causes Motion Sickness

I might have been alright with Jake’s first pee on the potty but for his subsequent demonstration that the growing up will only accelerate with age.

Half an hour later, he, Lily, and I were having breakfast on the back porch on a perfect early summer morning when his five-year-old friend next door came outside with his mother.

“Good morning!” I yelled for all the neighborhood to hear.  “Jake peed on the potty!”

“I got stickers!” Jake added, waving wildly at his friend.

“I got a video game!” his friend answered back in the sunny way of small children who don’t realize the full import of what they are saying.

A moment later, Jake was carefully peeling the stickers from his shirt.

“What are you doing?” I exclaimed.

“I want to put them on the table,” Jake said with a certain determination in his voice.

“If you put them on the table, you can’t put them back on your shirt,” I explained helpfully.

Jake gave me a duh look, even though I’m pretty sure he hasn’t yet mastered the concept of his actions having future consequences.

“Don’t you want your friends to see your stickers?” I said, even as I helped him stick them carefully onto the table.

“No,” Jake said.

Outside, those stickers no doubt remain stuck to the deck table, perhaps curling up at the edges in the heat of the afternoon sun, abandoned like so many baby habits that Jake drops behind him in his inexorable, heartbreaking march toward — gulp — adulthood.

It’s about here that I want to cry, even though I know pretty much anyone reading this is yelling, “He’s only two-and-a-half years old!!!”

Yes, I know he is.  But he’s no longer two years old and sitting at the table eating his snack after school like a big boy.  He’s no longer eighteen months old, running on short little legs where just a few months before he could barely stand up without the help of a nearby piece of furniture.  He’s no longer a year old, tasting his first cake and erupting in an adorable frenzy of sugar-fueled excitement.  He’s no longer nine months old and uttering his first word — “dog,” naturally.

I know I don’t want him to be any of those other ages.  In fact, there are times I wish Lily could skip over them and be what is unquestionably my very favorite age so far.  Until she gives me one of her no-holds-barred toothless grins and I appreciate just where she is right now.

Still, there is an undeniable sadness that comes with every precious first your child experiences. Because it will never be the first time again.  Because the first tooth will give way to the first pee in the potty and before you know it he will be sitting behind the wheel of a car for the first time.

I want him to do all these things.  I revel in his growing maturity.  But I am besotted with the way it is steeped in a two-year-old mentality.  I am in love with his smooth, round, whiskerless cheeks.  I know that his too-long shorts with the diaper peeking over the waistband would look just wrong on a much bigger boy (even without the diaper).  I count myself fortunate for every unself-conscious cuddle, every demand to sit in my lap, every joyous greeting.  Because one day his peers or adolescence or just living life will take these things away from me.

This sort of melancholy is a very good reason not to dwell in the past and not to rush toward the future.  We can’t see either one the least bit realistically, and, it occurs to me, we tend to use them more to torture ourselves in the present than for any useful purpose.

Why, for instance, should Jake peeing in the potty make me cry over the fact that he no longer grins open-mouthed and toothless at strangers like the rock star we once dubbed him?  And, more to the point, why does it make me think about him driving a car?

We have become so accustomed to skipping over the present moment — framing it between a past we don’t fully recall and a future we haven’t a clue about even if we think we do — that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.  We forget to savor the real moment because we’re too busy thinking we can savor moments past and future.  And, in doing so, we realize with a sudden, stomach churning lurch that we can’t savor them because they are fleeting.

Sure, the present moment is gone before we can grasp it.  But if we pay attention to each present moment, they become full and real and something to which we can open our hearts.  Unlike imagined and reimagined fragments of things that have already happened and things that will happen in a way we can’t imagine.

And so, before I lose any more of it, I will simply embrace Jake’s first pee on the potty.

Besides, Mike later filled me in on a few details that remind me of just how far the car keys are from Jake’s still chubby fist.  For the record, Mike informed me, Jake “left about a tablespoon in the potty, then stood up and let fly with a quarter cup or so on the floor.”

Plenty of time to enjoy his toddlerhood, indeed.

Getting Over Imagined Fears and Seeing What’s in Front of You — An Urdhva Danurasana Variation

Feeling reasonably strong in my home yoga practice today, I decided to play a little the way I did in the far past days of my 6:45 a.m. yoga classes.  I decided to walk up and down the wall in urdhva danurasana, upward facing bow pose.

What struck me as I rose in urdhva danurasana and prepared to walk my hands up the wall until I was standing was that this was, um, kind of scary.  I didn’t remember it being scary.  What if I slip?  How can I possibly make it to an upright position?  What if I fall on my head and no one but Lily, snoozing in her swing, hears the loud crack of my skull connecting rudely with the floor?

So I focused.  I looked at the wall instead of my mind’s eye movie screen playing in front of it.  I looked at that wall and I climbed up it, hand over hand.  And when I was standing, I lifted my heart, tilted my head back, looked at just how far away that wall was, and reached backwards for it anyhow.

And, no, my head did not hit the floor.

But if I have stirred up unconquerable fears for you, I offer as well agnistambhasana, or double pigeon.  Release those past fears from your hips and you may find yourself walking up walls sooner than you think.

Instructions for Walking and and Down the Wall in Urdhva Danurasana

Agnistambhasana Instructions