Took the weekend off from here, because having a 5-year-old means your weekends really aren't yours, although he's at an age now where you can see little peeks of the end of the Acid Trip Years, where everything is new and weird and you never know what's going to happen from minute to minute, let alone tomorrow or next month.

When people say "they grow so fast," I tend to assume that's what they mean. You can watch them growing and learning in real time. Their brains are exploding inside their heads, and they're taking on new thoughts and emotions at a dizzying rate. Some nights, you can almost hear their bones growing as they sleep, like bamboo, three feet a day.

Through that bit, any thought they can complete coherently is a cause for celebration.

The human animal is just an astonishingly ornate little contraption. You just try to keep him on the rails until he gets more or less up to speed and can start making decisions about his life and the world.

I loved X as a baby, and a toddler, and a little kid, but there isn't a moment or phase that I will miss now that he's through them. The joy I get from raising him isn't in something he did, or a point in time where he was the perfect mix of innocence and cuteness or whatever. I'm loving the growing process. Every aha moment, every time he figures out something new about whatever part of the universe he focuses on this week, that's what gets to me. Watching him grow, learn, get smarter, wiser, stronger, more sure of himself, more empathetic, better able to interact with other kids & grownups, more aware of the world around him and out there, that's what rocks me.

He'll bump up against the mean parts of the world soon enough. It's already starting to happen. But when that happens, we just have to be ready with the idea of kindness and empathy and action being the first reactions to all of that. Given the world he's being dropped into, he's going to need it.

The birds of his morning alarm are going off now. Back to school with you. With me. With all of us.