Sonny hits the six-month mark

Incredibly, six months have flitted past.

It's now officially half-a-year ago that Sonny emerged to torment... that is to say, brighten our lives. There Mum was, worried to all heck because the doctor had been just a little too generous with the epidural and she couldn't feel the lower half of her body at all. Push, the doctor and nurse had said... and all she could do was sort of heave, except she didn't know if her muscles were responding at all.

Luckily, she did enough. Sonny duly arrived - looking (if this makes any sense at all) initially impossibly big, and then impossibly tiny. He's been making up for that ever since, staging a still-astounding demonstration of accelerated growth powered solely by the rather thin-looking milk that Mum produces. By now, he moves much more, yells much louder and responds far more readily to stimuli than just a couple of months ago. "Things will be pretty good till he's about two years old," a friend told us the other day. Obviously, he hadn't spent much time with our little fella, who's by now enormously more of a hassle than before.

The weird thing is, though it's only been a half-year, it's really not that easy for us to remember what life was like without Sonny. Sure, we can pack him off to the infant care centre and zip over to Starbucks for lattes, telling ourselves 'Ah, how we miss this freedom'. And we do, sort of. But Sonny still lurks as a mental presence in our minds, an inner clock is always ticking down towards when he must be picked up from his caregivers. There's a perpetual reminder of the Sonny-fication of our lives, whether it's the photo in Mum's wallet or the overflow of toys and clothes at home. He can't be gotten away from, we wouldn't really know how to start - and it's not as though we'ld ever want to (save during the odd stressful moment).

Looking forward, too, a whole host of fresh milestones are already swimming towards us (including, literally, Sonny's first dip in the pool; Mum's already bought the infant trunks). His teeth are impatient to erupt and get chompin': We know because we can feel them when Sonny decides our fingers will make a nice snack. His full-bore crawling days are almost upon us, and he's half-way towards being able to sit up. Mad mumblings and burblings point to the life-changing moment when he will utter his first words. By the way, Mum and Pa are still vying to see if he'll say 'Mum' or 'Pa' first. Place your bets if you like.

Now that we think of it, that competition was brought up in our very first post (click here to revisit it). And all the coming milestones, trivial or momentous, will continue to be chronicled in these ill-disciplined ramblings. Of course, the blog is just another appurtenance of Sonny's baby-faced takeover of our lives. Six months down... a lifetime to go.