Six

Little S turned six over the past weekend. He had a small party with his grandparents and then on Wednesday we had a party for him and and six friends. I did both parties by myself and I’m partied out!

He’s changing physically. Suddenly his legs seem to be getting really long. I looked at him stretched out in the bed last night and we talked and I couldn't’t believe his legs were so far down the bed. I seem to have this perpetual image of him as a two year old with this stocky little body, climbing over him to read a bedtime story and his legs were never in the way. Now they’re in the way. How did this happen? I told him what I was thinking and he said to me “where were my legs before?” and I pointed to really high on the bed and he said “I was tout petit!” and I said “yes you were.”

He’s very taken by anything having to do with knights and castles and he spends hours constructing cities and lining up his armour and telling me all the technical terms for parts of the castle. He knows all the nooks and crannies and has names for parts I never knew had names! As soon as he walks into the house he goes into his deguisment box and gets into his chevalier clothes which we’ve made by cutting up old clothes and attaching belts and whatnot. Strangely enough he refused to dress up for his own party—go figure. He’s unpredictable like that. Like for example he went to school for a whole week wearing a red cape we’d made out of a satin skirt. I had to ask him to take it off at the gate to the school but he made me promise to bring it each day after school and he’d put it on right away as soon as he saw me. Then suddenly he just didn’t need it anymore.

When he isn’t playing with his knights and castles he draws. We do a lot of family drawing at the dining room table before dinner (highly recommended!) and he can easily spend two hours cutting paper, painting and making a drawing stack. I am keeping a book of some of his best work and I’m amazed at how much there is. I don’t feel like he’s particularly talented, not much more than any other kid, but he’s so invested in drawing. It’s how he spend all of his free time outside of the knights and castles construction. Of course his drawing are mostly along that theme, knights and castles, but he also enjoys watching me draw and trying to draw exactly what I’ve drawn. He also likes to draw parts of the house, windows and lamps and whatnot. I’m happy that he’s picked this up from me (and that I picked it up from Danny Gregory) It’s a great tool for helping you see better and it’s fun to look back at them.

As I write this I realize his interests are pretty narrow and he probably needs to get outside on his bike more. We’ve just had such strange weather. It’s been raining for nearly a month straight. It’s also hard to write about him because he has so many problems at school right now and since school occupies so much of the week there isn’t much else to write. If I start writing about his school it will turn into another sort of post and probably evolve in to a rant so I’ll leave it for another time.

So there it is from Little Man to Bigger Little Man who already has hair on his legs. Where has the time gone?