"Mommy, go."

It finally happened last night.

I was putting Caedmon to bed, which, though I’m exhausted and am looking forward to my imminent freedom, is one of my favorite moments of our daily routine. We talk about his day, we sing “Wheels on the Bus” and “Happy Birthday” to all his friends, we take turns blowing raspberries on each other’s tummies. It is our special time, just him and me.

I prolonged my goodbye, as I often do. I snuggled in for an extra kiss, an extra tickle, an extra whiff of Johnson & Johnson plus little boy. And I don’t know if he was just tired, or if he was simply holding me to the “goodnight” that I kept saying, but he looked at me, and with no ill-contempt, said, “Mommy, go. Can you go?”

My heart just about stopped.

Mommy, can you go? When has my boy ever wanted me to go? I mean, yes, there was a period when he needed his privacy as he did his business in his diaper, or when he would tell me to go, because he didn’t want to stop whatever he was doing for me to change him. And then, sometimes he will urge me to leave when he is playing heartily with his Uncle Ed (his favorite person in the world besides Thomas the Tank Engine) when he senses an impending termination of his fun by my looming presence. ("Caedmon, it's time for lunch/go inside/go to bed."... Moms can be no fun sometimes.) So okay, fine, Caedmon has asked me to go many times, but never like this! Never with such cool insistence and an actual desire to be apart from me simply because he was tired of my presence. And never has it been during our goodnight time! At that moment, my memories flipped like a speed rolodex to all the instances I couldn’t pry him away, when he cried because I had left the room, when he would reach his arms out through the crib slats as I said “goodnight”… But yesterday, it was “Mommy, go.” And so it has begun.

I played it cool, as I didn’t want to make it a big deal, but once downstairs, I had a good cry on Wayne’s shoulder. “I miss him,” I sniffled. “I really, really miss him.”

The truth is, I’ve noticed a marked difference in my boy over these last few months; he seems infinitely older and profoundly altered from Toddler Caedmon. For the most part, it’s been fun, though bittersweet, to watch this development. He helps me with simple chores, like feeding Lucy, and actually manages to keep most of the food in the bowl. He has a real sense of humor and tells “jokes” (his favorite: “Ding-dong!” “Sam-sui!”—his version of a knock-knock joke… though don’t ask me what that means). And when Maroon 5’s “Sugar” comes on the radio, he exclaims, “I wuf that song!” and proceeds to bop his head to the beat. Sometimes, though, he’s an outright menace—eating toilet paper or stepping on my gift wrap like they’re a pair of skis—and he’s taken to saying “hah?!” incessantly so that he sounds like a crotchety old lady. The worst is when he sticks his finger in his ear to fish out a juicy gob of earwax and then waves it in my face, and as I bat his gunky finger away, I warily acknowledge that I am, indeed, raising a boy. And that’s the thing; these antics are not of a baby, but of a boy. It seems as though Toddler Caedmon has turned into a kid right before my eyes.

Maybe it’s his sudden and swift acquiring of language or his recent promotion to Big Brother. Maybe it’s because we said “goodbye” to diapers this summer and that he started preschool for the first time earlier this fall, or perhaps he’s just developmentally on cue for three-and-a-half… It is probably all of the above, but that did nothing to assuage this mama’s bleeding heart, and I went to bed with a sigh and a sentimentality for what I can’t believe is already the past.

This morning, though, was a new day, and all was well again, especially because it was garbage day! At the first distant rumblings of the trucks, Caedmon still stretches out his arms in an excited panic, and though he weighs a fair amount more than a year ago, I heave him onto my hip, and we still rush out to catch the show each week. This morning, after a mad dash across the house, hurdling toys and moving boxes, we made it in the nick of time. And as we basked in the glory of these majestic giants, he was my little boy again, with his arms wrapped around my neck and a gleam in his eye only a three-year-old could have as he followed the blinking lights of the garbage truck disappearing around the corner.

And as I stood barefoot on the cool sidewalk, our hearts still thumping in our chests, I held him to me just a little bit tighter. Who knows how much longer we’ll rush to meet the garbage truck or that he’ll let me carry him at all. Until then, I will certainly savor the vestiges of his babyhood and do my best to nurture and foster my growing boy (all the while so thankful I get to do all this over again with my baby girl). Because more than ever, I feel just how fleeting and few these little years are. 

Caedmon recently found his old hat and stretched it over his head. See the difference between 8 months and 3-1/2!

I love this mixture of baby and boy: still donning his bib and drinking from his sippy cup but sitting at the table like a big boy and "reading" his construction "magazine" (a mailer updating the community on the local EchoWater project).