FIVE

"You melt my heart." I told him that, just now. "What's melt?" he asks me. I pat my chest and tell him that he makes my heart hurt, I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Then they were playing a game, they are running away. He actually stopped to make sure I was okay. I pretended to be distraught, and his eye began to water for real, he didn't want to upset me. "I wouldn't really want to leave you", he wanted to make sure that I knew.

And now my baby is five. His birthday was Monday and we're spending a birthday week of family visits and a friend party and cakes and cookies and doughnuts.

I've registered him for school. We've got the kindergarten round up on Friday.

When he was first here, just newborn, we spent 10 tired days sleeping on the couch. I could lean over and lay him in his carrier and he would cry. He just wanted to be right there, up on my chest. I would pseudo-sleep, propped up, so terrified that I would let him slip or fall. I joked to J that he would think his name was Buddy, because I called him my little Buddy. Wherever I go, he goes.

It's been that way a bit this year. We spend hours and hours together. Buddy and me. It's been the perfect, perfect way to spend the year before kindergarten. The bond is solid, he has no question where we stand. If he will allow it, he will be my Buddy for as long as I live.

Sigh.

So he's five. And the years he has spent on earth have been beautiful and wonderful and fantastic.

And the other morning he informed me that herbivores eat only plants and that his eczema is complicated.

Oh the places he will go.


I love you, Buddy. With all of my melted heart.
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