Monster Turns Five!

Last month my little monster turned five.  I’ve written about how this age is rapidly becoming my most favorite.  Monster is proving to be the greatest kid ever.  We really love him a lot.

He requested a pirate birthday party this year and for the first time we invited friends from school.  He was so very excited to stuff his invitations into envelopes and deliver them to his friends.  The party was great, filled with pirate games and a pirate ship piñata, ice cream sundaes and running around with a gaggle of 5 year olds.  Later that night, after the party had ended we ate tacos with his grandparents and cupcakes with orange frosting, all per his request.  The kid knows how to do birthdays already.

 

At age five he remains sweet as pie.  Seriously, this kid.  He loves his baby sister and (usually) plays well with his middle one.  The very first sentence he learned to write all on his own was “I love you mom” and I am the very happy recipient of that note on a regular basis. 

showing off his tie of course 

In the last few months he has taken an extreme interest in “being handsome.”  After baths he stands in the bathroom painstakingly combing his hair as neat as he can manage, and for his birthday he asked my mom to buy him ties and bow ties so he “could be handsome” and he wears them all the time.  It’s kind of the cutest.  Earlier this week we rode our bikes.  On one of our pit stops at the library he bemoaned the fact that earlier that morning he had combed his hair “handsome” and his bike helmet had messed it all up.  Life, man.

He’s starting to read and write which is so great.   I love, love, love watching him make sense of letters and words and fall in love with books.  It takes very little persuading to let him stay up later and read just one more of his Superman primary readers.

We’re finding him extremely interested in God.  He asks us to read to him from the Jesus Story Book Bible each night and he brings it with him to church on Sunday.  He comes home from school with little notes he’s written about loving God and he tells us he has dreams about being in heaven and seeing Jesus and Granda.  In his dreams heaven has mountains and he’s excited to go there.  This little faith is emerging and I’m so protective of it, knowing I’ve done nothing to create it, but have all sorts of power to add baggage to it.

Recently he started asking if he could work out with me at the gym.  After dropping his sisters off in childcare I let him run a few laps with me on the track.  He ran with his arms at tight ninety-degree angles, hands stiff just like The Flash.  Every so often he would break out of it, turning back to look at me with sweet eyes and a mischievous grin, daring me to race him.  My heart welled more than a little as I ran with my boy.  We raced and giggled and I fell just a little more in love with this kid.  In a million years I couldn’t have dreamed him up and he is more than I ever could have hoped for in a first born.  He’s sweet and funny, charming and thoughtful. 

Happy fifth birthday, Monster.  We love you so!

Pictures are courtesy of my friend Mary, who is, obviously, so so talented!