Rohan turns one.

#267: and so do we.

Dear reader,

I am 37 years old. I have always been 37 years old. I live in Vancouver. I have always lived in Vancouver and nowhere else. I am a parent. I have always been a parent. (There was nothing before this, only memories like a mirage.) Rohan turns one year old today. And so do we. We have always been one-year-old parents. An infinite present stretches over the geography of my life.

In today’s post, drawings of the past twelve months.

The SneakyArt Post is a newsletter of secretly drawn art of the world. Every week I share the latest pages from my sketchbooks and the best ideas from my journey as an artist, writer, and parent.

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I drew Rohan for the first time just 10 minutes after he was born. He would not have a name until a couple of days later. The doctors said they had had photography in the delivery room before, but never a drawing.

For the first couple of months, Rohan got daily massages from his grandmother. His grandparents were here to care for him when he was born. Lucky him.

Most of the drawings from the early times are of him sleeping. He was asleep a lot.

He had an excellent lounging pillow for his spot on the couch. He didn’t move back then. If you put him somewhere, he stayed there.

I remember when he started developing expressions.

In no time at all, he was rolling on the floor and trying to crawl, learning to coordinate arms and legs together in pursuit of a goal.

He loved the introduction to solids. The thrust of his expression was - “Where has this been all my life?!”

In India, Rohan met his great-grandmother. She snuck him some spicy food one day but he did not even react.

The day he learned to pull himself up to stand, everything changed, including the way I drew him.

One day, I tried to imitate his poses, following him around the house on my hands and knees, standing and falling and rolling as he did. This lasted about 6 minutes.

He smashed the heck out of his homemade smash-cake. We managed to save some but it wasn’t pretty.

What a life. It has always been this way. Thank you for being a reader. You have always been here.

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