Another year with my crazy love bundle (and orbiting planets and other such philosophical nonsense)

How to sum up this past year? It's tough to describe (aside from the obvious...that it flew by in a blink). I recently read the musings of a couple mothers...and their thoughts are knocking around in my head, trying to help me make sense of what I'm thinking.

One of them really resonated with me when she said,

I was the sun and they were the planets. And there was life on those planets...And I got to beam down on them. To watch. To glow.

It was such a great article that I e-mailed it to my mom. And she asked me if I was feeling like a sun...to which I had to respond, "no. I'm feeling more like a planet - revolving around his sun."

And then I read another blog post where a mom captured it just exactly...she wrote EXACTLY what I was feeling about my relationship with my firstborn (and about the changes that came about when my secondborn arrived...but that's a different story). She said,

It’s like [we] were in the same orbit, revolving around each other. Our connection was insanely tight.

This. This just exactly describes the past year.

And that year has been amazing. Being so completely the focus of each other is intoxicating...but already I can feel us gearing up for a major change in our dynamic. I'm sensing his first pushes towards independence and realizing it's time to step out of my place in the center of his world. That it's time instead to become the foundation from which he explores his world. And man, it's ripping...that realization. Knowing that already he's taking his first steps away from me on the road to becoming the man that he'll one day be. (And that thought in turn makes me think, "holy shit...who gave me this much responsibility...I'm helping to form the man that he'll one day be...that's some seriously scary shit." But again, I'm digressing.)

Already he's such a cool little dude and you can begin to see what a great man he'll one day grow into...and I'm so proud to call him mine for as long as he'll let me.

He's funny. He cracks me up on a regular basis. This morning after approximately two hours of attempting to get us to let him out of bed (beginning at 5:30), he finally succeeded when he banged his head into his headboard and exclaimed, "need ice!" Talk about ROFL. You gotta give the kid points for creativity.

He has the energy of a million Red Bull...all packed into one tiny little bruise-covered body - because balance doesn't seem to be his forte.

He's sweeter than sugar, and spends about 10% of every day kissing, snuggling or otherwise loving on his brother...and has quickly learned that snuggling with mommy is one sure-fired way to extend bedtime at least a few minutes.

 

 

Which brings me to my next point...he's a genius. I'm regularly amazed by how smart my little man-person is...he's TWO (just) and here's what he's already packing in his repertoire:

• The alphabet from H-Z (he'll do A-D separately and apparently hates the letters E, F & G...he never, ever says them. Lately he's ending the alphabet with "X, Y and 6, 7, 8, 9, 10"...cracks me up.)
• Counting to 12 in English
• Counting to 10 in German
• Countless nursery rhymes/songs including, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Jack and Jill, and several others
• Most of the text to all the stories we regularly read including Green Eggs and Ham, Old Hat New Hat, Dr. Seuss's ABCs
• And he spells his name

I think I have all of these on video...better said, I have them all on 762 different videos and need to splice them all together...(so I should have that done in, let's say, 2079?)

In any case, I'm amazed pretty much daily by what an awesome kid I have...and how lucky I am that I get to be his mom. I'm even more regularly amazed by how quickly time passes. I was looking through old videos with Dylan the other day two months ago and marked for the blog backlog when I stumbled across this one. That was just a little over a year ago...now look at him.

 What a difference a year makes.

So here's to the past year...and to enjoying the next. I can already appreciate the truth in this statement:

Having a two-year-old is like having a blender that you don't have the top for.

 ~Jerry Seinfeld