Milestones

I've been thinking about milestones for the last several weeks. My twin boys turn twelve on Wednesday, and I'm feeling triumphant. I made it past the diaper years and now we are in pimple territory. One of them wears a man's size 11 shoe. The other can give you any fact about the St. Louis Cardinals.

I'm not feeling maudlin, just surprised. Over the course of my three kids being babies, I changed somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 diapers. Sometimes, the days would stretch out in front of me, in a seemingly endless progression of sameness. But they weren't, and that's what I like about writing milestones. They give your characters a reason to reflect on the past, to have great heaving shifts of emotion and mood, and to reveal their inner workings to the reader.