I made breakfast sausage this morning. At the request of the birthday boy.
He has the menu planned out for the entire day. For dinner he wants spaghetti and mashed potatoes.
(As you wish.)
This morning as he played his new harmonica, I asked him if he could remember the day he was born.
"Yes, the girls carried me around everywhere and dressed me up like a girl." (He is still affronted about this treatment.)
"Yes they did, but not on the day you were born. On the day you were born you were all mine. Do you remember what happened? It was a Wednesday morning."
I waited while he finished a few bars of his next harmonica solo.
"Yep. And then all the water came out."
"So I called to Dad and he got the other kids up fast because you were coming in a hurry."
Then we had a brief discussion about exactly where babies come out. And since he was six I explained. He said his friend had it all wrong, and then played a few more harmonica measures, this time "Happy Birthday."
I finished the story with the usual quaver in my voice as I told him about his dark eyes looking up at me and he gave a big finish on the harmonica at just the right moment, because he knows the story by heart. And then he chattered all the way to find his backpack and out the door, about dinosaur cakes and parties and the presents dressed and waiting for our celebration tonight.
I watched him run to catch up with the girls.
A few years ago David and I went to talk to my doctor about having another baby. He was quiet for a while and then confided that he hadn't been able to sleep after Ethan was born. He said that in his thirty years of practicing medicine he had never gotten that close to disaster and still had a good outcome. That it was a very close call. For both of us. He said it still scared him when he thought of it.
Someday I will tell Ethan the rest of the story. How heaven's hand was in his life from the beginning. How the day and hour of his birth were known and watched by heaven, because if everything hadn't been just right, it all would have gone terribly wrong. How there is no such thing as a coincidence. How there are no "little" moments.
But today, I only tell myself. Over and over again.
And this morning, as I watched this fourth and final miracle run down the street, I thanked heaven again for the life of this extraordinary boy. Especially today, now we are six.
"But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."
