It Feels Like Chaos: Five!

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Five!

Dear Son,

You came down for breakfast yesterday morning and gleefully announced, "Today's the last day I'll ever be four!"

Loudly. You announced it loudly. Because that just how you do things.

And so it is. Today. Five years of you!

I think back often on the comment a friend made 2 years ago after you'd managed to bathe and shower yourself in a mud puddle at your big brother's baseball game. You stood there dripping with filthy water and she said to me, "Just think how boring your life would be if you'd stopped at two kids!"

How right she was!

Without you we'd likely never have known the experience of millions of popcorn kernels dumped onto the kitchen floor, hours and hours in the ER, or cleaning up an entire room coated in baby powder -- three different times!

Okay, so those were all bad examples (although good blog material!), but really I mean this in the best way, you brought us the chaos and it turns out that's EXACTLY what we needed! And has been the key to so many other decisions we've made these past 5 years.

With you, our precious third child, we learned to embrace the messy and the more-children-than-I-can-hold-hands-with. Just to survive daily life we needed God more than ever, depended on Him rather than our confidence to hold it all together! That was GOOD.

I have learned a whole lot about enjoying life from you. Like, if you're going to eat some yogurt, just go all out and experience that yogurt to the fullest!

And why avoid puddles? Jump right in with both feet!

At five years old, you love the color blue, insist that nearly everything be blue. You love to build and create all kinds of elaborate buildings every day out of blocks. We've recently let you start on "big boy" legos and your ability to follow the directions and put the sets together is amazing to me! We did this set yesterday.

I didn't tell you this, but building legos isn't my favorite thing. It makes me sweat, what with all the attaching one piece to a section and having another piece break off and then you have to flip back 10 steps in the book to figure out how to put it back together and lo and behold you finally make it to stop 35 and think, "Oh thankfully we're almost through!" only to have it start back over with step 1, just step 1 of a whole new part you need to build to attach to the first part! But, anyway, I did it, the lego building because you love it and it was precious time spent with you! Time that is flying so fast!

This past year you gave up your position as the baby of our family when we welcomed home your 3 year old sister from Ethiopia. I truly didn't know how that would go for you, but am so proud that you have embraced the big brother role beautifully!

You laugh loud, hug often, make friends easily, and oh my at the cute!

That picture of the one-and-a-half year-old you takes my breath away, makes me miss those days with all your toddler antics. But, you're pretty adorable these days, too, and you promise nearly every day to "always be my baby" even when you're taller than I am!

Here you are just a few days before turning five, at your preschool's messy outdoor day. Right up your alley, you were in heaven for the entire three hours of it!