Daddy, turn off the sun . . .

I'm reeling a little this week. My first child turned 10. That is a 1 and a 0. That is double digits. That is a decade. That is a pre-teen.

I swore it wouldn't happen, I promised I wouldn't let it, I took steps along the way to prevent it, but it did. I blinked. I can honestly say that when they laid that baby on my stomach and I looked down it was the first time in my life I saw the fingerprints of God. He was a huge baby, he didn't want to come out. He was a week over-due before he made his easy, gleeful journey to the world. We still laugh and say the inside of my uterus says "Wes was here 1999". He was a little pioneer in the adventure that we call parenthood. He survived the first fumbling baths (too hot,too cold?). The creamed spinach baby food (I gagged when I fed it to him). He survived the Hamburger Helper years (ironically that is what he asked for for his birthday meal). He survived always matching, never getting dirty, and a mother who screeched at every teeter and every gonk to his noggin.

God blessed me with easy babies. Wesley never complained about anything, except once when the sun was shining in his eyes as we drove. He yelled "Daddy, turn off the sun!". He may have been 3 at that time. Around that same time when he had asked me 1000 question in about a 5 minute span and I had answered "I don't know" too many times for his liking, he said to me, "Mommy you need to find out a lot more stuff, 'cause there's a lot I want to know!" We'll I've sure learned a lot more stuff. I've learned patience, understanding, unbelievable frustration (we've all locked ourselves in the bathroom to escape for 5 minutes, right?). Mostly, I've learned what true, unconditional, soul-searing, love is. He was the beginning, our beginning, my beginning.