One morning after I put Anna down for a nap, the middle two were distracted so I stole a few moments with David.

He’s doing big kid stuff — working a 300-piece puzzle, drinking seltzer water, wiggling his two loose front teeth with his tongue.

Moments earlier, I’d just peered into Anna’s mouth, checking to see if those same teeth were breaking through her gums.

In some ways David’s infancy seems just as long ago as Anna’s. For one, almost seven years, the other, seven months. It sounds strange, I know. But babies have a way of bending time.

Perhaps it’s because the newborn stage is equally eternal and fleeting, so you never really feel “in it.” Or because, with an infant, the concrete concept of time is suddenly abstract. Your existence is divided up into three-hour increments so strongly that the 24-hour doesn’t apply anymore, and when someone asks you when you graduated from college you squint into the sun and say, “17,520 feedings ago.”

This past year, as Anna has stretched and grown from infant to baby, David has turned into such a big kid.

Whenever we go to playgrounds, I watch David scale the equipment and I think about how I used to hate when big kids played around him — the way they run and jump and swing with absolutely no regard to my toddler taking hesitant steps around the base of the equipment.

(And now I’m like, AHEM past-Amanda, clearly playgrounds with monkey bars are meant for older kids. Maybe the real hazard on the playground is YOUR HIGH HORSE.)

But it’s true. One day you’re helping your kid play at the bottom of the slide and like five minutes later you’re screaming at that same kid, “SLOW DOWN! YOU ALMOST KNOCKED DOWN A BABY!”

Time and babies. Neither makes a whole lot of sense.

(Also, have you ever in your whole life seen a better set of thighs?)

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