... and one more new thing

April Cain's latest entry in her Thinking It Over column looks at the years and the changes that have passed since she traveled to Russia to adopt her son. I've been thinking about that this summer, too; it's hard to ignore how much my son has grown, since over the past year he has really started to grow. I don't mean developmentally or intellectually, though there's certainly been some of that. I mean that my little peanut, who used to wear the same size in clothes for years on end, who hung off the bottom of the growth chart for most of his life, who could never keep his pants up, so nonexistent were his hips and belly ... that tiny guy, who I used to tuck under my arm, is suddenly almost as tall as me, and is busting out of the shorts I bought him just a couple of months ago. He's a peanut no more. I'm proud, of course, and relieved to seem him so sturdy and healthy, but ... it's hard to switch tracks from looking for smaller sizes and serving bigger portions of food to recognizing that he needs bigger and bigger clothes and maybe ought to stop at seconds at dinnertime. Do you suppose those parasites he brought home from our trip to Russia 10 years ago, the ones we had to battle the pediatrician to test for and were never sure we really defeated, finally just died out on their own?