Setting the baby “bar”

This weekend, Sam started smiling pretty reliably in response to things that we do — Kathy, my dad & I were all able to get a wide, no teeth grin out of him a bunch of times this weekend. Pretty great, I have to say. I could have done that all weekend.

A smile from Sam is literally all it takes to make me feel just amazing — over the moon, really. And it got me to start thinking about expectations and what it takes to make me (or us) happy. Just a month ago, we were over the moon just to have a baby boy in the world with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Then we raised the bar a little bit, and we were just thrilled when he’d eat 20 cc’s of formula. But the days are gone when we’d be really excited about a loud belch, or a big poop, or a 2 hour nap. (Actually, I’m lying. We still get pretty excited about all 3 of those things. Not kidding. The other parents reading this will know what I’m talking about.)

Anyhoo, over the coming days and weeks and months and years, we’ll have a bunch of new firsts together — first cooing, first words, first steps, first appointment to the Supreme Court, first Nobel Prize, that type of thing — and they’ll all be great. It seems to me to be good to keep raising the bar and encourage development and achievement.

But I want to put a stake down now, set the bar for now & all times. I hope to always be touched when Sam smiles. Melt the way that I did this weekend. Lots of milestones left to go, I think — I’m not sure that many will be much better than seeing our boy be happy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2005 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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