The amazing five

I love five years old. I love it more than I've loved any other age.  And yes, I do say this every month and year that goes by that I love THIS age so much more than the others.  The thing with five though, at least five for us since Alex didn't go to school this year, is that this year feels almost like a bonus.  We've been awarded this amazing gift of keeping our son for ourselves for an extra year and that extra year was one in which he was more mature, more curious, more thoughtful, more disciplined, more brilliant, more amazing than he's ever been before. 

He seems to be in this beautiful sweet spot between being my baby and being his own boy.  John and I are still the coolest people he knows and he'd rather be with us than anyone else in the world.  Max is still more his playmate than annoying little brother (though Max does a good job of being that often enough already).  He comes and snuggles in bed with us when he wakes up in the morning, he gets excited by EVERYTHING ("Hey buddy lets go to the grocery store to pick up toilet paper" Alex: "YAY! I LOVE TOILET PAPER!") and it seems he is absorbing every single thing he encounters.  He's currently obsessed with an old show called Beakman's World.  It's a kids show from the 90's about science concepts and Alex is absolutely fascinated by it.  He wants to try out all of the experiments and sometimes will completely freak me out when out of the blue he'll be swinging a basket of cars around and explain to me that they don't fall out when the basket goes upside down because of centrifugal force.  He's really smarter than a five year old should be in my opinion and I worry a bit how Kindergarten will keep up with his seemingly insatiable appetite for knowledge.  Likely it won't and it will be up to me to feed that information-hungry monster with experiments and projects and learning expeditions.  He is curious about the world.  Like me.  And I envision he and I spending time together at the library and museums finding answers to all of our questions.

Part of what makes five so thrilling is that I know that everything that makes me so happy about this age; adoring his mother, the sweet innocence and wonder...it is temporary.  Sooner than I'd like he'll become a surly teenager who is embarassed by me and doesn't want to do anything but play video games and try to get access to porn.  Eventually he won't need me at all and he'll be his own person, out in the world and I'll be lucky to get a phone call occasionally.  He'll do things I don't agree with, he'll be friends with people I hate, he'll tell me he hates me... and I know, without a shadow of a doubt that despite anything he does or says I will continue to fall more in love with him, exponentially more, every day that goes by.  Things will happen that I can't save him from; he'll have his heart broken, he'll suffer disappointments, he'll make mistakes and I'll be powerless to stop his hurting.  I suspect we'll both long for the days when a cuddle and a kiss solved all the world's problems.

But for now, he's five.  He's five and he's mine and I am going to soak up every last second of this dazzling, magnificent, almost painfully perfect time that I can.