I tiptoe into the room and pause as the light through the door glows against his hair. He lies flat on his back, arms flung wide, embracing the world in complete, innocent abandon even as he sleeps.

I should wake him and make him walk to the bathroom by himself. It’s my 10 p.m. potty trip for him; without it, he doesn’t always make it until morning without an accident. He sleeps so soundly, so deeply, that he says, “I didn’t hear my body say I need to pee,” when he wakes to a wet bed. So I stay up late each night to help him heed the call of the bladder one more time and set him up for success.

Maybe waking him completely would help teach him to do this on his own, but I’m selfish. This is the only time now when this 3-year-old dynamo, this 38-inch tyrant, still feels like my baby.

I pick him up and nestle his head in my shoulder, like I did when he was just a mewling lump of need. His weight slumps against me, breath soft in my ear. Just last week he hit the 30-pound milestone after six months at 29 pounds, and we had to have a little party in the bathroom, so proud of that pound. He tells me all the time that he’s going to “get soooo big my head is going to go through the roof.” Each time he does, a ghost of a tall, blonde teenager who towers over me and lives in a world all his own flits by in the background of my mind and I clutch so hard to my memories of this 30-pound piece of perfection.

The seesaw between baby and boy is so steep at this point. I carry him to the bathroom like a 6-month-old; he stands at the toilet, yawning and scratching his butt as he pees like a 60-year-old man.

And so I’ll keep picking him up, breathing in his hairsmell, feeling his cheek on my shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that his toes hit my knees now when I tote him.

Driving home from school the other night, Toby was telling me that his classmate Jay was nice to him that day. (There’s ongoing drama over whether Jay is his best friend that day or hits him and takes his toys. Welcome to preschool social life.)

“It prithed me, Momma,” Toby said. Cue the guessing as to what “prithed” meant. They don’t tell you in the mommy books that 90% of toddlerhood is spent frantically trying to solve the mystery of a lisped, mangled new word in their vocabulary as the 3-year-old tornado in 2T becomes increasingly infuriated at your stupidity. “PRITHED, MOM.”

“Prized?”

“NO, Thurprized.”

Surprised!!! When did he learn THAT word, and how to use it correctly in context? Who is this kid? When did he learn to evaluate a reaction to a social interaction like this?

All the Scary Mommy articles talk of ‘what they don’t tell you about the realities of motherhood,’ and all those kitschy truths they list are right, but GOD the biggest thing, the biggest secret about this motherhood thing, is how ephemeral it is. Every day, they’re different. Every. Day. He becomes a new person, one who can skip, one who uses “surprised” in a sentence, one who takes 20 minutes to pick what shirt he’s going to wear in the morning. Every day, decisions and tasks that were all mine to do to keep him alive, he takes over. And it happens so slowly that all of a sudden, your burbling blob who happily ingested anything in reach tells you he doesn’t like the spice on the salmon filet.

It’s such an odd push/pull, the twinges of sadness at the versions of him lost combined with the anticipation of seeing what future adaptations of him might become. I am firmly one and done, but I can see how this process can become addictive.