Happy Birthday, Kiddo!

One of my favourite FB features is the “On This Day” app that lets you see your posts from the same day in years past.

I particularly appreciate the reminders of days spent with my children when they were younger, and my hopes, anxieties, and impressions of the people they were and were becoming.

Today is my oldest son’s 12th birthday, so my FB memories are naturally filled with pictures and posts from Guillame’s past birthdays. It struck me, reading over a birthday post from his fourth birthday, how privileged I am to have this front-row seat as my children grow and discover their gifts and passions.

What struck me even more–and maybe this is too obvious to make a post out of, but I want to muse on it a bit–how much continuity there is between the person my son was eight years ago and the person he is now.

I wrote:

“Some days I am sure he is smarter than I am. Some days I can’t figure out how anybody can be so clueless. He’s stubborn and clever and hilarious and good-tempered, defiant and loving and goofy and in the middle of everything, all the time, 100%. He is always ‘on’.”

I could say exactly the same thing about Gui today. He’s bigger, and everything else in his personality and character has broadened in complexity and scale accordingly, but there’s no disconnect at all between who he was and who he is. He is brilliant and clueless, stubborn and clever, hilarious and good-tempered, defiant and loving and goofy and always in the middle of something, all the time. His hyperactivity reveals itself in verbal chatter when feeling social and constant fidgeting when preoccupied rather than in racing around the room and bouncing on furniture, but it’s there, bubbling up.

Sometimes I miss having babies. My youngest child is five now, and it is easy to look at pictures of my children when they were younger and feel a pang for the days when I could swing Gui up in the air, or curl Pascal up under my chin for a nap, or run my lips over Aetheline’s sweet downy baby hair. They grow, and they change.

But I don’t want to forget, in my nostalgia, that the firstborn child I worried over and cherished is in front of me still, creating alien alphabets for me to decode and trading puns with me. My sweet preemie is the rambunctious and unbreakable third-grader who never stops moving. The darling girl-baby who gave me a reason to wake up during the darkest year of my life is the self-possessed child who proudly reads to me before bedtime.

And my cup brimmeth over.

Image: Guillame and Pascal, 2008.