Where Did the Time Go?

My son is seven. He reads Dog Man books with a flashlight under his covers after bedtime because he thinks I don’t know. I know. I let it happen because the alternative is fighting about lights-out with a kid who is voluntarily reading, and I’m not that stupid.

My daughter is two. She reads books by tasting them.

Somewhere between those two facts, several years disappeared. I’d like them back, please. I was told there would be time.

The Lie They Tell You

Other parents warned me it would go fast. I nodded politely and thought: sure, but not for me. I’ll be present. I’ll be mindful. I’ll soak it in.

I soaked in nothing. I blinked and the baby who used to fall asleep on my chest is now a second-grader who corrects my grammar. He knows what “actually” means and he uses it constantly. Actually, Dad, komodo dragons can run twelve miles per hour. Actually, Dad, Pluto isn’t a planet anymore. Actually, Dad, you put my lunch in the wrong bag.

Actually, kid, you used to fit in one of my hands.

The Writing on the Wall

You see it coming with the second one. That’s the cruel trick of having two kids at different ages. The older one is a spoiler for the younger one. Every phase your toddler enters, you’ve already watched your older child leave.

She’s two now, and everything is a discovery. A stick is a discovery. A puddle is a religious experience. She narrates the world in fragments: “Big dog. My shoe. Daddy look. Daddy LOOK.”

I’m looking. I’m looking harder this time, because I know what I know now. I know that the two-year-old who demands I watch her jump off the same step forty-seven times in a row will, in what feels like a long weekend, become a seven-year-old who reads in her room with the door closed.

And I’ll stand in the hallway and wonder where the jumping went.

What I Wish I’d Done

With my son, I took ten thousand photos. I have his first steps from four angles. I have videos of him eating spaghetti that I will use as leverage at his wedding. But what I don’t have is a record of who he was. Not what he looked like. Who he was.

At three, he was obsessed with excavators. Not casually interested. Obsessed. He knew the difference between a backhoe and a front loader and he would tell you about it whether you asked or not. He had a favorite excavator at a construction site near our house and he named it Frank.

That’s gone now. He doesn’t remember Frank. I barely remember Frank. And no photo in my camera roll captured the particular intensity of a three-year-old boy who has found his calling in heavy machinery.

A book would have captured that. A story where he was the hero, driving Frank through some impossible adventure, with his actual face on the page and his actual obsessions woven into the plot. He’d still have it. He’d look at it now and say, “I was really into excavators, huh?” and I’d say, “Kid, you have no idea.”

But I didn’t know that existed then. So Frank is gone.

The One I’m Not Going to Miss

My daughter is ready. She’s two, and she’s exactly the kind of person a story should be written about. She’s fearless in a way that concerns me medically. She loves cats, hates socks, dances until she falls down, and has a stuffed elephant named (for reasons known only to her) “Pasta.”

This is who she is right now. In six months, Pasta might be replaced. The sock hatred might resolve. I tell my wife that the fearlessness will develop some guardrails. Secretly, though, I hope it doesn’t.

But right now, today, she is this exact person. And a book made for this exact person will still exist when she’s twenty. When the fearlessness has become courage and the sock thing is hopefully sorted out. She’ll hold it and see herself at two, with Pasta, with her particular grin, being exactly who she was before the world started asking her to be anything else.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, she’ll show it to her own kids someday. “This was ME when I was your age.” And they’ll look at the illustrations and see their mom as a tiny, sock-hating tornado, and they’ll love her even more for it.

That’s worth getting right.

The Dad Tax

My son is past the picture-book window. He’s into chapter books and graphic novels now, and honestly, Dog Man is pretty good. I respect his taste. I also respect that he’s reached the age where a book about himself might make him roll his eyes, and that’s fine. That’s seven. Seven is eye-rolls and independence and “Dad, I can do it myself.” I’m proud of that, even when it stings.

But his sister. His sister is right in the sweet spot. The age where a book with her face in it isn’t embarrassing. It’s magic. She’ll point to the page and say her own name and think the whole world was made just for her.

She’s not wrong.

The time is going. It’s already going. I can feel it moving under my feet like a train I’m standing on, looking out the window, watching the stations blur past.

I can’t slow it down. But I can write some of it down. Not in a journal I’ll never finish. Not in a photo album I’ll never organize. In a story. Her story. With her face and her name and Pasta the elephant and everything that makes her exactly herself at exactly this age.

Because the writing on the wall says: this won’t last.

And the writing in the book says: but this will.