My Baby Girl Turns Sweet 16 Today

The weirdest thing just happened. It seems like just a few months ago, I took a couple of weeks off from work to care for my newborn baby girl, Reagan. I know how cliché it sounds, but when I think of that morning 16 years ago, I remember it with such clarity it could have been last week.

In addition to my show here at Fun 107, I was writing as a columnist for the Standard-Times. In my first column after her birth, I wrote "Her little lip quivered as she wailed her first cry. As the baby was placed onto my wife's chest, I knew that I had just experienced one of the biggest and most important moments of my life. I had just begun an epic journey of love, of worry, and of more responsibility than I can even fathom."

I remember the drive home from Tobey Hospital, nervously strapping her into the car seat, hoping I was doing it right. I don't think I went over 25 miles an hour on Route 6. When we got home, I clearly remember carrying her in the house in the car seat, plopping her on the couch, then looking at each other and saying, "Now what do we do?"

After all of the hype and preparation, it was at that moment that my wife and I started our new lives as parents.

Today, we'll be driving 25 miles an hour again, but this time, she'll be the one behind the wheel, driving us to her own birthday dinner in Fairhaven. The past 16 years have gone by so incredibly quickly that it is petrifying to me.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how fleeting her days are living with us under the same roof. She'll be off to college in two short years. Except for summers, which were consumed with hanging out with friends, I never moved back home after I left for college.

Her life will only become busier and busier and get fuller with each passing day – which it should. But the casual home hangout sessions, neither of us having anywhere to go, are leaving my grip like grains of sand. The tighter I try to hold on, the more I realize that it is an impossible task.

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I was talking (venting) to Christine Fox about this today, and she had some really great perspective.

"Relate and compare Reagan starting her life to you, and how you have remained very connected to your parents and sister throughout all your phases of life," she said. "It'll be just like that with Reagan, and then Matthew."