Happy Birthday

At eight o’clock Tuesday morning, when he still hadn’t risen for the day, I went into his room and laid quietly beside him on his pillow. As if sensing that I was near, he rolled over, one hand clasped in a ball, with his thumb hitching a ride up and down with every inward pull of his tongue, and the other hand reaching, searching for my scattered mass of morning hair, strewn about his 20 year old pillow.

As he lay there, still half asleep, fulfilling the two most critical urges of his young life, it must have hit him what day it was. On his belly, with his thumb still stuck in his mouth, he lifted one eye to look at me and whispered, “Birthday!”

He’d been faithfully counting down the days until he’d finally turn five for at least a month. I was continuously amazed that he was able to keep up with his count even when he had 25, 24, 23 days to go. But his special day had finally arrived, and he could not have been more pleased.

He’d spent the weekend with Grandma and Granddaddy and shared cupcakes and a song with his cousins. He celebrated another happy birthday song with his grandmother and the triplets, and yet a third with his classmates at school. As eager as he was about his big day, it seemed every time the singing began, he’d get a case of the birthday bashfuls and hide himself right under the table. But even that couldn’t quell his excitement.

Before four o’clock ever rolled around, he had asked me at least a hundred times “how much longer” until his party. We usually just plan family parties, but this year, a mere two days earlier, he decided he wanted “a kid party”. With too little time to plan, we invited a friend, and that was certainly enough to satisfy our little birthday boy.

I suppose he sensed that he needed something to keep him busy until everyone arrived because he asked if he could make a sign for the porch to welcome his guests. I wrote a few words on a piece of paper, and he took his box of chalk out front. To the best of his now five-year old ability, he etched into the concrete, in purple: “Cooper’s Birthday 5 yrs. old.”

Finally, party time had arrived, and so did our guests, including three unexpected but welcomed neighbor kids from across the street. A table full of six, excited little boys sat patiently awaiting a feast fit for a five year old. And seventy-two pigs in the blanket, 13 cupcakes, two dozen rice crispies, an oversized bag of cheese puffs and a bottle of Sprite later…they were full, with the best yet to come.

When a boy’s birthday comes at the change of a season and he seems to be growing faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball, he tends to receive a lot of “necessities,” presented as birthday gifts, of course. And necessities for Cooper this year came in the form of jeans and long sleeve shirts for the winter. This is simply practical to a parent, but for a little boy, if you can’t drive it, throw it, eat it or tear it up, it’s just not much of a present. Luckily, a new monster truck from Grandma and a set of Matchbox racers from Uncle Max was enough to please this kid right out of his newly-opened pants.

He was thrilled to receive new baseball gear, and he seemed to learn quite quickly how to tear into every birthday card in anticipation of something green. But when he got down to the last present, he realized that there was still something missing.

Earlier in the week when his grandmother asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he said, “Well, I really want a pitching mound, but my dad’s getting me that. So I guess you can just come to my party.” But somehow, that last box on the table didn’t quite look like the mound he had imagined.


In fact, after he had the paper ripped off and the box torn apart, it still didn’t look much like what he expected. And it wasn’t until I told him, “Coop! It’s your pitcher’s mound! Smell that rubber!” that it finally dawned on him that he’d gotten just what he’d asked for.

As the day came to a close and we tucked our boy into bed that night, I asked, “Well, did you have a good day?” He smiled his sweet, toothy smile and whispered a satisfied “Yes!” with that look of happiness and contentment that every parent prays her children find. And with a hug, a kiss and a “Love you, Mom,” I squeezed him one last time. “Love you too, Buddy. Happy Birthday.”

And that’s All in a day’s work!

Born out of time

If ever there was a child born out of time, it would have to be my oldest. I came to this conclusion while sitting on my grandmother’s back porch watching my tenacious four-year old son, tirelessly trying to perfect his spiral. The sun was going down; he’d been outside all day, and we could barely see the football shimmying across the yard, but there he was. Determined to get it right before he called it a day.

It struck me at that moment how out of place he seemed. He could have been sitting indoors in the comfort of his climate-controlled home. He could have been eating popcorn prepared in a microwave oven. He could have been watching cartoons played on a machine that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. But not my boy. Not while there’s daylight to burn.

This day for him was not unlike most others. My child, born near the turn of the century, has spent most of his life outside. He’s out the door at dawn and begging for just one more inning after the sun goes down. Whether he’s working in the heat or playing in the freezing rain, he’s got a plan for something and a mind to make it happen. There’ll be no wasting daylight.

I’ve watched him out the back window, throwing rocks into the air and hitting them with a stick. I’ve seen him swing a fake bat and run, as his pretend ball goes sailing over the outfield wall, rounding every base while announcing to his invisible audience the outs, the inning, and the score.

I’ve seen him walk along the creek bed, stick in hand, poking in the mud and looking for some new discovery he can store away in his mind to reenact during his next big adventure. He doesn’t need to be entertained. He’s a boy on the loose among nature.

I’ve listened to him give play by play for the greatest imaginary game of baseball between the two biggest rivals of our day, just as I suppose young boys have done for years.
“Jeter’s at second. Damon’s on first. Teixeira’s at the plate. He swings! It’s a long fly ball!! It’s…It’s…a homerun!”

I know he would have fit in perfectly with the sons of decades ago. Playing stickball in the streets. Putting baseball cards in the spokes of his tires and making the perfect crease in the middle of his favorite Yankee cap so it would fit in his back pocket just right. That’s who he is. I think it’s in his blood.

There are a million and one distractions for kids these days; it’s a wonder our children ever learn how to play. But this boy of ours seems to have figured it out on his own. He’s already spent most of his young years building with Lincoln logs and shunting boxcars. And since he was old enough to hold one in his hand, he’s been driving those matchbox cars all over the imaginary dirt roads and race tracks in his head.

He’s perfectly content to sit by the radio and listen to a ballgame, even when there are a dozen more modern conveniences by which he could sit, being passively massaged. But not this child. It’s “tag, you’re it” or hide and seek, and I suspect cowboys and Indians is next to come.

Whether he’s perfecting his spiral or throwing himself pop flies, this boy could not be more at home if he were playing a pick up game in a vacant lot with a group of neighborhood boys, or sitting at the soda fountain sipping a bottle of five cent pop. I can almost see him trading marbles and baseball cards on the front stoop with his best pal who, just like him, lives and dies by the reading of his comics and the numbers in the box scores. Seems all he needs now is a Secret Agent spy toy and a Red Rider BB gun to make his descent back in time complete.

With his little red wagon, and his little blue View Master, this boy out of time is well on his way to being right out of the pages of Stand By Me, or probably more accurately, A Christmas Story. Now if he could just get his hands on that Secret Society Decoder Pin.

And that’s All in a day’s work!

Life according to boys

It’s interesting to me the way kids make sense of their world. At three and four, life is still so literal. They simply call things as they see them. And understanding the craziness that is our colorful English language is oftentimes the source of confusion and misunderstanding to the minds of the little ones we love. However puzzling, our boys just seem to draw their own conclusions about the many facets of the world around them. Here are just a few interpretations of life, according to our boys.

On love:
The boys and I have this game we play. We usually save it for when one of them is sick, or whiney, or tired, or mad. Some time when I need to really soften them up. Make them smile. Force them to be happy.

It starts simply, with a whispered “I love you” in their ear. This almost always invokes a sour look in return. But a mother must be persistent, so I try again.

“I love you more than coffee.” This usually gets an upward curl of the lip, only to be pushed back down by their stubborn will to stay mad. Again, I persist.

“I love you more than cinnamon toast.” “I love you more than sleeping late on Saturdays.” “I love you more than…(dare I say it)…chocolate chip cookies!” And that usually does the trick. By then, the boys are a bundle of giggles, asking as quickly as they can come up with a thought:
“Do you love me more than ice cream?”
“Do you love me more than baseball?”
“Do you love me more than the Yankees?”

On being himself:
Brisco’s newest wish is to be someone else.
“I wish I was Coopa,” he’ll often say. As the younger brother, I know there are a million and one reasons he might wish he was Cooper, but I’m always surprised at what he comes up with.
“So I can go to school.”
“So I can do the hand jive.”
“So I can wear red cleats.”

Sometimes he wishes that he was Daddy, “so that I can drive.”
And other times he even wishes he was the mom.
“I wish I was you,” he says with a droopy face.
“Why do you wish that?” I ask.
“So I can cook!” he says, with a why-in-the-world-else kind of tone.

On school:
After almost nine weeks, my little school boy is still gung ho. He wakes up every morning and asks, “Is today a school day?” If I say no, he hangs his head and curls his nose and lets out a disappointed, “Aww.” But if I say yes, he does a quick fist pump and an excited “Yes!” under his breath. A sign that maybe he did get a little something from his mother’s genes.

On giving:
Sunday mornings after the boys get dressed, they grab their Bibles and take some money from their money jars to give to God. This week, Brisco yelled at his dad from the other room: “Dad? Does God take dimes?”

I tell them that if we give to God happily, He will give back to us. So being the kind of kid he is, Brisco asked impatiently, “Well, when am I gonna get my money?”

He’s not just concerned about his own money though. After watching the men put the collection plates underneath the Lord’s Table one Sunday morning, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, “When is God gonna come get His money?”

On discipline:
After terrorizing his mother and a dozen or so other shoppers last week, I let Brisco choose his discipline: take a spanking or take a nap. He chose the former. Who knew naps were so unbearable?

Lately, the boys have been doing their fair share of fussing. Dad has been home more than usual, and he’s already tired of listening to it. So yesterday, after a bossy, name-calling older brother and a screaming, tattle tail little brother fussed one time too many, he gave them both swats. Brisco came running in the house bawling and holding his bottom.
“Daddy gave us a spanking with a stick with no leaves!” he cried.
Holding back my laughter, I explained, “That’s called a switch, son, and your daddy knows all about them, so you might want to think about straightening up!”

And that’s life according to our boys.