William On Being Five

We start with Thanksgiving. Sometimes, William's birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day, but usually, we are still trying to finish off leftovers before we are making cake and celebrating William. George had a gig down in Apalachicola so we took a family trip to the beach thinking we would build sandcastles and have a picnic lunch as we watched the water. Within 30 seconds, William was diving through the water and dancing all about. That's our William.

He is five this year. A big day for him. Five feels big. Big smiles, big cries, big ideas, big trouble, big adventures, big imagination, big desires, big appetite.

He's such a strong spirit. He loves hard and thinks intensely. His desire to keep up with dinner conversations often leads him to miss eating his dinner when we are eating. Some nights, we send him to the porch with big tears and dragging feet, but every time dinner is gone and he is set to go.

He wants to be a storm trooper and a knight and a cowboy and a king and batman and superman and captain America and darth vader.


He is brave and strong. He's been riding a regular bike since three and has no trouble keeping up with us on bike rides. He can whip a frisbee and shoot targets with his BB gun (that one took some powerful training from Dad)

He loves to sing loud, really loud and filled with passion.

He's been wearing five for six weeks already and he isn't slowing down.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cattle Are Lowing

Image
We’d waited since February for her to calf. By November 20th, all eyes stayed on mama cow - Trahlyta. Her due date was close and we were more than ready. The waiting wrung our patience.  October was wet and boggy and Trahlyta looked sick. We discovered rotting flesh in her foot. Foot rot set in from standing on soggy ground day after day. George and the children tended to her around the clock as they cleaned out oozing infected sore and cared for her hooves. We’ve had her since she was a few days old. The children raised her. She’s part of our family. And, she’s our first cow to calf. She held the keys to our own dairy supply and to our tender hearts as we watched her stay under the weather. All we could do was wait and make sure she stayed healthy and it wasn’t as easy as we expected. But now, her hooves were healthy and her belly was swollen and we were waiting.  On the morning of the 24th, I rushed to the window at the first day light. Down by the creek, I saw Trahlyta and a red cal
Read more

Love Them. Feed Them. Talk To Them. The Rest Is Icing On The Cake.

Image
We've been homeschooling for ten years. At LEAST once a week I think that homeschooling is the worst possible thing on the planet. I look at my kids and think, "I've got nothin'!" It is scary. It is hard. How many hundreds of times have I called my extremely patient husband and yelled, literally screamed into the phone, "I CAN'T DO THIS!" There was a day, in the middle of a lesson that wasn't going well at all, that I walked out the back door, walked to the pool, jumped in fully clothed and yelled as loud as I could under the water. I got back out of the pool, calmly walked inside, changed my clothes and continued with the day feeling much relieved. George, my husband and biggest cheerleader - also a major part of our homeschooling life, is diligent to walk me off the cliff of homeschool despair. When I feel like I am failing our children, he offers me this morsel... Before I give you his advice, I would like to mention at this poi
Read more

Mother's Day Garden Rescue

Image
At 5 a.m. this morning, I felt a cold breeze brush across my forehead from the window above me. Immediately I remembered we didn’t cover the tomatoes. Or the squash. Or the basil. Or any of the fragile life tender green and growing. Growing because we planted it and because we watered it and because we want it to feed us and because our family has spent countless hours prepping soil, dragging water, and watching the weather closer than the Weather Channel.  There have been five other nights that we remembered to cover the plants in preparation for a coming storm or freeze. We’d already been up in the middle of the night rushing to protect it all as the winds whipped at us. We had found every last bucket and canister and jar that would cover our precious starts. Most of our work felt in vain because we hadn’t had a frost or a wild storm actually do enough damage for the shelters to make a difference... Truth -- I was frustrated because we had covered all the plants the nigh
Read more