I have this vivid memory of our next door neighbor Tom coming over last year to pick up some extra baby clothes. Both of our wives were pregnant with our sons, due in a month or so and just a week apart. I was passing on a stack of newborn clothes we’d received with clever little “I love my daddy” taglines and football helmets, irrelevant for our family both on the daddy and the football front.

“Are you guys feeling ready?” I asked.

He shook his head, “Niema’s always talking about getting this for the baby, and buying that for the baby. I keep trying to tell her we’re only having a baby for a year, but we’re going to have a kid for the next 17 years. We should pace ourselves.”

I nodded sagely, because I could tell that was what was expected of me in this moment as the fellow non-pregnant parent, presumably unimpacted by the hormones that had presumably taken over our spouses.

“I know,” I replied, holding up the onesie, “They’ll probably only fit in these newborn clothes for a minute.”

But still, as I handed over the unimaginably small clothes, I couldn’t help but feel he was missing the point. We were having babies. Teensy tiny little miracles who would not only require a host of baby clothes and contraptions, but would also change our lives in inexplicable ways. One day we would both go into hospital (it turned out it would in fact be the exact same day), and come out parents, responsible for keeping alive and loving the helpless little creatures who would fit into these doll-sized clothes. Yes, he was definitely missing the point. We were about to become the parents of baby boys, and this was a really, really big deal.

I understood that our baby wouldn’t be in newborn clothes for very long. What I clearly missed, as evidenced by the bins and bins of unworn or barely worn 0-3 and 3-6 month clothes now stacked in our garage, is how quickly he would also outgrow all the rest. That he would wear those 0-3 month clothes for, at the most, three months, and, more likely, a few short weeks. Even more, that three months would still be three months, even in Life After Baby.

From the starting line of pregnancy, when you are preparing and training and waiting with equal parts terror and excitement for that gun to fire so you can fly across the line and enter Parenthood, it feels like an eternity will pass between each stage: hospital, birth, going home from the hospital, first bath, first smile, and so on.

In many ways, it is an eternity. Breathe in, breathe out. Put one foot in front of the other. Spend endless moments and hours and days staring at the incredible little being in our arms, figuring out how to survive sleepless nights, perfecting your diaper change, and mastering the ever changing task of keeping everybody in your little family fed.

Then, with unimaginable speed you start barreling towards the larger milestones. Your baby sits, stands, takes his first step, says his first word, and all of a sudden he is a person. His baby cheeks give way to defined facial features. One moment he is a helpless, mewling little bean, and the next he is clinging to your leg with mischief in his eyes demanding “up?” “out?” “uuuuuuppppppp!!!”, clearly now capable of complex thoughts like “if she hasn’t done what I told her to do by now she must not have understood me, let’s try it a little louder and clearer!”

Incredible. I mean, it’s really, really incredible. Sure, your life changes quite a bit when you first have a baby. You’re suddenly responsible for keeping someone else alive and fed. The art of cinema will have evolved several times before you see another movie. You’ll be in such a constant state of exhaustion that you’ll do things like finally manage to make yourself a cup of tea but completely forget to put in any water.

But what they don’t tell you, what they can’t possibly tell you, is that the changes just keep right on coming. You’ll probably never get the hang of anything again, besides getting the hang of letting go of needing things to stay the same. What you knew yesterday is out the door because today is a whole new ballgame. Yesterday morning my son woke up in exclusive need of snuggles and cuddles to the point where I made all of our lunches and a crockpot dinner with a 23 pound toddler balanced on my hip, asking “this?” “that?” “bite?” and grabbing everything I touched. The day before that, he was moving so fast in the other direction that I couldn’t even find him until I searched the house high and low and finally located him hiding in the dog bed, playing with the TV remote and trying to eat the bed’s stuffing (toxic no doubt). This morning as I write, he’s decided that if I am going to get up at 5 am to better myself then so is he. He’s currently yelling “shit!” from his crib, which I can only hope is a hybrid version of his two current favorite words: “sit” and “this.”

To those who know me well enough to understant that I absolutely, unequivocally love my son and love raising him, I like to compare parenting to a lobster slowly boiling in hot water. The universe raises the stakes and challenges, along with the incredible joy and rewards, incrementally every single day so that you don’t ever quite notice how hot it’s getting in here. It sneaks up on you, so that one day you are suddenly looking back and realizing that two years ago you were spending your days sleeping in, taking spontaneous day trips, watching TV, and training for half marathons (oh alright, you were also mostly spending them working, but that hasn’t changed, has it?). Now you are spending them doing eighty five thousand more things than you ever did before, most of which include wiping snot and cleaning up behind a tornado who takes everything out of every cupboard in the house, but also includes teaching someone how to blow kisses, singing in public even though you always hated your voice, and soaking up the unparalleled feeling of two chubby little arms wrapped around your neck. And the thing about parenting is, you can look back on those “before” days and think at exactly the same time and in equal proportions: “I had no idea how lucky I was”, and, “I had no idea how lucky I was going to get.”