Fifteen years ago right now I was recovering from one of those a little bit of everything births — induction, labor, pushing, c-section. I was spending every second I could staring at the 5 pound peanut I’d come out of the experience with. He looked like an old balding Jewish man (a look he kept for several months). He was quiet, a great sleeper we had to force awake every couple hours to feed. I was feeling no pain and wasn’t tired at all. It’s amazing what three straight hours of sleep can do for a body that was heretofore used to waking every other hour to pee at the end of pregnancy.

The years really do fly by. You think you’ll never get there, wherever there is. You think he will never be out of diapers, it will never take less than a half hour to get out of the house, he will never tie his shoes or remember his phone number or learn how to put a jacket on a hanger. I’m still waiting him to learn to use a hanger, and while it doesn’t take a 30 minutes to get out of the house, it probably takes 20.

When my son was born I didn’t know anything about autism or IEPs or how credit cards can pay for what insurance companies won’t. Before he was born I cared if people liked me. Now, teachers and school administrators can hate me all they want as long as they provide my kid with what he needs to succeed.

I was snobby about letting my child watch television, eat processed food and white sugar and flour. Now he has a bike and his own money and we live a mile from Dairy Queen and a supermarket and there are soda machines at the high school. It’s just as well because I don’t think I can keep enough food in the house to satisfy my teenage mutant. For his birthday dinner tonight his grandparents took him out to XXX Root Beer, a local burger joint that’s been a fixture in the Seattle area for decades. He ate a double bacon cheeseburger, fries, one and half (very large) milkshakes and a bonus chocolate sundae they gave him for his birthday. At least after all of that he admitted to being full.

Remember when you were a child and 15 minutes seemed like forever? And people would tell you how as you get older time goes by faster and you’d roll your eyes because even if it was true, it didn’t apply to you or your life. And now here I am, gobsmacked by the speed at which 15 years have gone by.

And yet…

While that 15 years flew by, I don’t doubt that the next three years, which I will spend grooming my son to pretty please leave home and fly on his own — ideally at or around his 18th birthday — will crawl by at a pace rivaled only by the speed at which children experience the day before their birthday or the last day of school. And as time inches by, I’ll remember the nuclear missile of happiness that would attack every morning — starting with a hop into the parental bed smelling of pee and morning breath. I’ll remember the first steps, first words, first baseball game — the latter? He told me the swearing loud guy behind us needed “a big time out”. And from today, I’ll remember the day when four people stared slack-jawed as my boy inhaled a couple days worth of calories in less than an hour.

Happy birthday, son. And many more.