notes from the thunderground

Parents, hide your daughters. This is my 6 year old. He’s too smooth for words. This is all him: he dressed himself this way, he put on my hat, and he asked my wife to take the picture. Guh. I’m in love with him. He’s pretty great. :)

My son turned five years old today. Remembering where we were five years ago today, with his heart stopping when he was born, the nurses and doctors giving up hope… and him gasping and breathing 15 minutes later as they were moving him to the scale to pronounce him…

We don’t tell this story a lot, because it is in turn heartbreaking and fantastic and unbelievable, and in so many ways can only be explained as a miracle.

This is my five year old son, and he is definitively, absolutely, miraculously alive.

A few toys, I said. Why don’t you pick out a few things so you don’t get bored when we’re having coffee, I said.

Note to self: Be more specific.

I don’t understand him most of the time. He sees the world through the same lenses that I do, but with a different pair of eyes. His imagination is as small as two vitamins becoming the tires of a racecar, as giant as the dinosaurs that sleep on the roof- dinosaurs that his Dad fights off with a sword.

I am his superhero- I hear this from him over and over again, and he believes it with a passion I cannot understand. He cannot see my shortcomings and failures. He has empathy for others in ways that I forgotten how to access.

Today, he listened to his best friend and adopted “uncle” (who is only a year older than him) talk for nearly ten minutes straight, then turned to him to say “Qian! You’re a great storyteller”.

He says things that four year-old boys aren’t supposed to get yet.
“We’re safe as houses now”.
“That Jack [his two year old little brother] sure is a fine boy”.
“Papa, you just need to open up your heart to a little boy…”

He constantly kidnaps my brand new issues of Wired- because of the computer ad or the picture that he likes or because Buzz Lightyear and Woody are on the cover. He makes up songs about “Jessie the Cowgirl” and falls in love with his Aunt Emily, his Grandma, and his cousin Alice Kay. He is joy and energy and Life.

He shows me what Jesus is supposed to mean.

For a few months, when he was two years old, he used to say something that can only approximate in sounds as “MRNAAMER”. We never did figure out what it could mean….

Sushi: start them young!

After the rush… The nap. Daniel Emery is in the center of this picture if you look close enough…