Dear Moss, Teeth and poop. Love, Dad

Moss, it's time we had a talk.  Up to now, I've gotten away with pretending you'll always be my happy little boy with your wide, toothless grin and your ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, anyone.  You've been  growing this whole time -- I know that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise -- but it's been lots of little things and it's all been very gradual, so without concentrated comparisons of earlier photos or Mom's blog posts it's not always been obvious.

This week, you decided to change things up.  It started with a sleepless night for you and Mom, after which we discovered your first little bottom tooth coming in.  Then, after another rough night, we found out both of your bottom teeth are coming in at once.  Then we realized both of your top teeth are on their way, too.  I can't imagine the amount of discomfort you're feeling, but it's got to be pretty hard to deal with it all in one shot.  That toothless grin is about to be nothing more than one of my very favorite memories of your first 7 months on this spinning earth.

We've been stepping up the real food lately, as well.  Watching you suck down strawberries and romanesco and carrots and salmon and all the other delicious foods you're exploring for the first time has been so exciting and interesting. That sense of new newness I feel when I watch you discover a taste or smell or texture that I've long since grown accustomed to has added a sense of novelty to my life that I haven't felt in so many more years than you can even imagine at this point.

Last but not least, with all this new input, there's the recent development in your output that I can't say I'm as happy about.  It was bound to happen eventually, I know, and of course "everybody poops", but that first big boy shit caught me entirely of guard.  I almost threw up and apparently scared the hell out of you, but I wasn't exactly emotionally/physically/mentally prepared for that one.  I'm going to try really hard to fight my knee jerk revulsion for your sake... Mom says it's pretty important that I not stigmatize this in a way you can't fully understand since we don't want you getting weird about it later.

Gone are the days when you were certainly a person but at the same time different; here to stay is the rest of your life, when you'll be occasionally gap toothed, when you'll have serious preferences about our food (dear god please don't be as picky as I was), and when you'll poop like a person rather than an infant.