Happy Birthday Second Son.
365 days of joy you have brought this family. More really, because oh, I have loved you from the moment two pink lines wavered into view.
You love remotes, markers, and carbohydrates.
You are a biter, but I understand, because you have a mouth full of teeth (seven) and two more on the way. So I forgive your burning need to chomp down on my shoulder Suarez style. And when I say no, because I must, your frown is perfection, a symmetrical half circle of hurt feelings. Does it make me a bad mother that I laugh at how cute your frown is? Because I do …
When you snuggle me, we must always be skin to skin, an arm, a cheek, location is irrelevant. It is all heartblood and warmth you must feel, your fingers kneading any square inch of momma you can reach.
You adore your madcap siblings and will always choose to play with them over toys.
They make you laugh, a wild giggle that pours out of your wide smile and toothy grin.
And oh, that wild giggle? It sooths the rough patches in my soul.
You have been my Balm in Gilead. A salve to wounds carved out over eight years and five pregnancies and two heavenbound babes. Calm in the storm of our fourth deployment and this one harder than all the ones before it.
You are an easy babe in the way the world defines it – happy, content, smiling, joyful. But the world’s metric of success means little here other than less stress at the babysitter. I love you because you are ours, a gift, a treasure, a perfect puzzle piece in this not so wee family o’ mine.
I’ll tell you on other days, and other years, about being a man. I’ll tell you every day about loving Jesus, and how much He loves you. {And He does, my child, my boy. Infinitely more and better than I ever will.}
But for now, just know this. I underestimated the elasticity of this blood-mover of mine. How it stretches in concert with your birth, your breath, your loose collection of cells bound up by porcelain skin. Each DNA strand part me, part your dad, and oh how the whole of you is so much greater than the sum of us.
You, the Fifth, are nestled comfortably in with the others, in my same-sized, ever-growing heart-core. And marvelously, miraculously, the loving you never takes away from the loving them. A nonsensical, faultless equation in the chemistry of heaven and earth.
And Second Son o’ mine? Nothing in this life, or any other, will change how much I love you. Ever.
Happy Birthday.
~Momma
P.S. We may or may not have had a rave for your birthday party, with a fair-sized portion of your crazy cousins. There was dancing on countertops, iphone disco balls, glowsticks, and 80s music. You. Are. Welcome. (More pictures coming tonight!)