anders' 5th birthday

my youngest child, wonderful dear sweet anderson abel, turned 5 a few weeks ago and i am like dr jekyl and mr hyde about it.  on one hand i am so content with this season of life.  with the obvious exception of sweet lena's needs, the kids can almost take care of themselves.  long gone are the days of diapers and spills at every meal and not being able to open doors.  we talk less about "don't take that toy" and more about aslan the white witch and real gospel conversation.   instead of abby cadabie (how does one spell cadaby), we watched honey i shrunk the kids the other day.  there is less play dough and more uno and checkers.
it's a beautiful time.
then my youngest turns 5.  F-I-V-E.
all that basking in this great season turns into to a sinking feeling and this strange mom-lament of days gone past.  being a mom is so strange at times.



but our anders turned 5.  and despite all of our attempt to coerce him otherwise, he only wanted a party at chuck-e-cheese.  a friend with 5 kids ranging in age from 6 to 13 told me the other day that none of her kids have ever even been to chuck-e-cheese and i burned with jealously so deep.

dear anders,
you are a remarkable little boy.  excitement and joy and love for others runs deep.  you are still quite rambunctious, but you are so sweet about working on it.  the other day you said "mom, sometimes even if my head wants to be gentle because it knows it's a time to be gentle, my body just wants to run and do ninja moves".  (5 year old boy probs. the struggle's real yall).
the other day, you came to my bedside at the crack of dawn on a saturday.  you said "hey mom, is it sunday?" i told you, through still asleep eyes, that no it was saturday.  you were so disappointed and say "awwww man, i thought it was sunday so i dressed sunny".  you had on orange pants and a yellow shirt.  this is maybe one of my favorite anders stories to date.  that, and the epic talent show.   you love sports.  basketball, soccer, running, you are so active and pretty coordinated too.  you still have this beautiful bend to justice.  you want everyone to be treated fairly and you are bold to speak it.  you are great with visual and spacial learning.  you wanna know how things work or how they fit together and legos are all the rage these days.  you love coloring with markers with great detail and precision, bu you don't love writing, which makes learning to write your name better and better difficult.  but you push through and you are doing great in preschool.  you are so crazy friendly and you bring joy to others no matter where you are.  you will chat it up with a waitress or someone in a parking lot and the other folks always always smile.  you just make others smile.  and dear sweet son, you make me smile.  you are a joy.  i don't have words to tell ya how proud i am of your five year old self.