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Dylan, you're 5 months old today. Just this weekend you rolled from your stomach to your back unassisted for the first time… and then promptly refused to do it again when we had the camera rolling.

I started writing this entry on the train this morning, and finished it at home this evening. Since I started, you've also successfully rolled from your back to your stomach. We've decided that both were unintentional because it doesn't seem possible to coax you into a repeat performance — yet. (Now back to your regularly scheduled blogformance…)

You also started "solid food" — some "rice cereal" mixed in with milk. (For the record, I don't blame you for spitting it out. It looks oddly gross.) Add to that the fact that your uncle Jared and his girlfriend came to visit too, and you had a pretty big weekend.

You're almost consistently waking up in a "6:00" position (we put you down at "12:00"), and often, we find you up at the head-end front-corner of the crib, laying on your side, sucking your thumb in your sleep. You usually wake up very happy, and still, 5 months later, it melts my heart to see you smile; especially when it's because you see me.

You're half-way between scheduled check-ups at 4 and 6 months, so we don't have any official stats, but your mom and I estimate you weigh about 16 pounds, and you're probably about 26 inches long.

Still no honest-to-goodness, tv-commercial, giddy-baby belly-laughs, but you do laugh… or very happily cough, I'm not sure which. It doesn't matter, it's adorable either way.

Having just had a birthday myself, and thinking about what it means that I've been alive — breathing air, thinking, wanting, discovering, learning, and creating** — for twenty seven years, I both wholly understand and am flabbergasted by the notion that you're doing the same. It's amazing how so much of my daily life now revolves around taking care of you, yet the very thought of how you came to be and what lies in your future is impossible to wrap my mind around.

I work at a job that — not only did it not exist when I was born — nobody ever thought it would exist. I've been doing this job for somewhere around 10 years now, and it probably existed another 5 or so, in early but passable forms, before I ended up doing it. That means there was about 12 years between the time I was born and the time my job was conceived and realized. I'm not a betting man, but if I were I would bet the farm that your generation will get to work at hundreds of thousands of jobs that hadn't been conceived when they enrolled in college (That is, assuming colleges still exist in the form we know them today). That's not a particularly exciting thought, I guess, but it amazes me how fast things change, and how rapidly the speed that things change increases… which is why it's so hard for me to wrap my head around what your life will be like. (See? I had a point after all!)

So here's to 5 awesome months of life… whatever that means!

** Of course I mean you. What else?!