Just Add Fuel

In the fall of 1995 I held, for the first time, the first child of my circle of friends. It was the first time as an adult I held a baby, and I wept. He was just a few days old and was yellow with jaundice after a traumatic birth. Everything about him was astounding to me, to think that he'd been inside one of my friends - my smallest friend, in fact - and that small as he was that day, he was going to grow up to be bigger than I was. That everything that was his body and would ever be his body was already inside him, installed at the factory, so to speak.

He was the first (and the only, for a several years) of the next generation. Suddenly, I was projecting myself and my friends way into the future.

This photo is from almost two and half years ago but it's the most recent electronic-format photo I have:



Today I attended a baby shower for Princess Word of Thunder's daughter Pia. I always feel like I have to elaborate that Pia is no kid; my age is exactly halfway between hers and her mother's. Pia was 16 when we met, and I've always seen her as adult, or almost an adult; she seemed really together for a teenager, especially compared to me at that age.

After most of the people had left the party, Pia put up her feet and entertained us with belly bounces while Baby was squirming around in there, or whatever it is that babies do before they are born. Everything that this child is going to be is already there... Taking me back to where I was in 1995.

The picture below is from nine weeks ago, but none of the pictures I took today show her standing up with her belly out. Pia said that these days, it takes ten and a half sheets of toilet paper to wrap around her body (apparently TP squares are some standard pregnant-belly measurement, because it came up in a bay shower game too).



The first child of the next next generation is going to arrive in five weeks or so. Now I'm projecting myself and my friends way, way into the future.