Growth

For the last year or so, I'd been on the hunt for a growth chart for the doodle. You know the thing, you stand up against it and mark your child's height at various intervals. But I was running into trouble finding something cute. Honestly...there weren't a whole bunch of options out there to begin with, and they all seemed rather bland to me. So, I enlisted my sister and her embroidery machine to make one instead. And it's darling.

It starts with Elmo, then proceeds to Bob and Larry, then on to Mickey Mouse, and ends with Spiderman. And the doodle just adores it. He stands up against it almost every time he passes by and we make a big show of leveling out his hair to see where he is. But after the first couple of days I realized we'd need some kind of rule for how often we actually whipped out the marker - so we decided on the 1st of the month.

When he scooted up to it this morning, my heart cracked a teeny bit when I noted that he had shot up another 1/2 inch. (Since July (when we started marking) he's been averaging about 1/2 an inch a month and, while I'm thrilled that he's growing (obviously)...he's turning into such a big boy!) Looking at my finger on the measuring tape and exclaiming with him about how tall he was getting, I looked at his long legs (he's a leggy little boy) and pulled him into my arms. He wrapped his arms around my neck and snuggled into my shoulder, and that little crack in my heart sealed right back up.

He may be my big boy...but he's always going to be my baby.