Size Matters

"He looks so much smaller when he's asleep."

When M. Edium came home from the hospital, he was small enough for me to carry around balanced on one forearm. But over the next coupled of years, he took up a lot of space in our lives.

I'm not talking about emotional space or temporal space, which obviously is a given. I'm talking about how busy and occupied he kept us during his every waking moment, in one way or another. Whether it was keeping him safe, keeping him fed, or keeping him from having an unprovoked psychotic meltdown, so much of our daily lives revolved around him that he seemed to take on mammoth proportions. But then at night, after we finally got him to sleep and set him into his crib, he would somehow shrink back down to the size of a tiny, helpless baby.

Now that he's four, he's not quite so demanding on a minute-by-minute basis. He's more self-sufficient, and can tell us what he needs when he isn't. We can leave him alone for minutes at a time without worrying about what he's destroying. When we're in the room with him, we can often even pay attention to each other rather than worrying about what he's up to every second.

And as his perceived size in that sense has gone down, his actual size has gone up. Sometimes, when I go in to check on him after he's asleep, I still half-expect him to look smaller.

What I usually find is a larger-than-average four-year-old, sprawled diagonally on his mattress, bent backwards by the tangled pile of blankets and stuffed toys he always seems to balance himself on in his sleep. His sleeping size has caught up to his waking size.

I'm not buying him a bigger bed any time soon, though, I can tell you.

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Size Matters

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