Ode to My Baby Boy

If you’ve never read my About Fadra page, it might be worth a look. I don’t hide the fact that I’m a mom but you won’t find me pushing cute pictures of my kid on my blog all that often. I have plenty of other channels in which to do that.

But there is a line all the way at the bottom of that page that sums it all up for me:

While I don’t consider myself a “mommy blogger”, I am a mom and will blog about it from time to time. Why? Because out of everything I’ve done, it’s the greatest accomplishment in my life.

I am an extremely proud mother and especially so today. My baby boy Evan is five years old today. It’s his first big milestone. The first birthday that really seems to mean something to him. For the longest time he was actually terrified of turning five because he was convinced that the day he turned five he would be sent off to kindergarten. Luckily we’re past that now.

I did reveal to him today that his birthday was technically supposed to be January 23rd and not January 24th. I’m not talking my due date. I’m talking his scheduled delivery date. He was a breech baby and after weighing all the options, I decided to proceed with a scheduled cesarean birth. The hospital called me to give me the date and time my son would be born. And then they told me the doctor that would be on call and therefore would be delivering him.

I froze.

NOT HER was all I could think. And that’s pretty much what I said. This was one decision I was not going to back down on. I didn’t have much control the situation but I did want to have a say in who brought my baby into the world. They were able to reschedule me for the following day at a later time and my doctor was wonderful. I couldn’t have asked for a better obstetrician.

Still, Evan insisted that we should celebrate his birthday early since technically he was supposed to have already been in the world. I explained that his birthday didn’t count until the day he popped into the world.

The truth is that a lot didn’t count until he came into my life. Into our lives.

When I met my husband, we thought we’d have kids. And then we thought maybe not. And then maybe. And then maybe not. When the maybe finally stuck and we were graced with a beautiful baby boy, we both wept tears of joy. We had been married for years but we were only a couple. After the birth of my son, we became a family.

I look back on five years. Five long years that felt like five years. It’s been hard. Some parts of mothering are so natural to me and other parts are still so foreign (I really like my sleep and my alone time). I tend to remember the difficult times. Those are the ones etched in my memory.

Then I started looking back at how far my baby boy has come in five years. Really, how far we’ve all come in five years. We are a family with more good times than bad and being a mother has definitely been my crowning achievement.

Even though I’m not a mommy blogger, I beg of you to indulge me and just spend three minutes of your time seeing Evan through my eyes.