Childhood is a time of wonder, but that childhood doesn’t have to be your own. Fathers also have a sense of wonderment as they look at their children.
We wonder how many diapers we’ll have to change before our precious is finally potty-trained (for the record, I’ve done rough calculations and I’ve legitimately changed more than 10000 of ’em).
We wonder how our mates can be so involved in pre-baby planning items that leave us slackjawed and glassy-eyed.
We wonder how much stuff can fit in one small diaper.
We wonder how many times Junior can watch the same episode of Spongebob and still laugh.
We wonder how often we can seek out the source of a noise without having a minor stroke.
We wonder if there’s truth to the old saying that God protects small children, drunks and the United States.
We wonder if we can again figure out, let alone explain, the math that’s being presented to us for help by our children (I signed off on Eldest’s homework when she hit 10th grade).
We wonder how much food one boy can possibly eat in the course of a day, and we marvel at how sparse is the refrigerator at our own elderly parents house (assuming that income isn’t forcing them to choose between food and medicine).
We wonder about the source of these gifts that each child has (I was a lousy athlete and musician, unlike my own three).
We wonder, as we look at our babies, what they’ll look like at different ages and as adults (if you have an infant, make yourself a promise to purposefully look again at their sixteenth and eighteenth birthdays).
We wonder, as we look at our children, on their sixteenth and eighteenth birthdays, where the time went.
We wonder…