Kush has turned 5 !!!!!

Time really really flies, there is no doubt about it. I was blessed with a son on Aug 5 2004. He was so small then, so vulnerable, so innocent. I could hold him using one arm only. I remember that initially it took some time before he started recognizing me and accepting me as someone who is always around him. I remember that when ever I would shave my facial hairs, he would stop recognizing me :-)
Now 5 years have gone by and a lot has changed. He is now able to conjure up stories and narrate them well. He is still very young. Sometimes when I am lying in bed in the morning, I hear his little feet tapping on the floor as he runs from living room to bathroom, little tap tap tap, furious little slaps on the floor as he flies to bathroom so that he can be back before the ad break gets over. Now he prefers noisy little toys, especially those of Ben 10 franchise. Sometimes he creates such a din that it is almost impossible to sit through it :-)
We celebrated his birthday yesterday. Lots of relatives turned up to wish him. And he was very very happy. Usually he goes to bed by 9 PM, but yesterday we could manage to put him to bed only by 10 PM. He was very very tired and he was still singing "happy birthday to me!!!".
I sometimes wonder about the limits of memory, about how much can it store. And I have come to a sad conclusion that old memories fade rather quickly yielding their places to newer ones and that bad (sad) memories get imprinted on the walls refusing to fade into oblivion. Everytime I start thinking about the past, the regret and the pain of missed opportunities, of what could have been, come rushing in. In a sense, "power of now" was right. Past has got no place at all except giving us opportunity to learn something. Otherwise it weighs us down with its unbearable weight. Future is something that is still unborn (bhavishya ke garbh me kya chipa hai koi nahi janata :-)). But the Now as the present moment is the key. And it holds true for my relation with my son. If I start reflecting on it, I would tend to remember his tears and the callous manner by which I denied him something that he desired. And the regret will completely overshadow the happier moments. But of course it is not true. The landscape appears tinted because my memory tints it in a certain awful manner.
I love my child unconditionally. I have genuinely tried to make him happy and content. I want him to remember me fondly when he grows up and moves on with his life. I want him to look at his childhood days with fondness and I want him to have happy memories of his time spent with us. I had read somewhere that the nature of memories of early childhood drives the nature of personality of a person. So a happy and secure childhood will give way to serene outlook and a scarred nightmarish childhood will give way to suspicious outlook. I have been a cynic and suspicious all my life and I don't want my son to go through the hell that I have gone through. That is the only present I want to give him.