Boy #2 turns 7, & New Years Resolutions

Upstairs, folding laundry.  Suddenly, from downstairs there was a cry;

Boy #2:  "How do I turn it off?"

Me: "How do you turn what off?"

A moment's silence, then;

Boy #2:  "I can't turn it off!"

Me:  "You can't turn what off?"

Boy #2:  "I'm pressing the button but it just comes back on..."

My normal reaction at this point would be to go downstairs and sort the problem out, but since one of my few New Year's Resolutions this year is to do less for my children (as in, foster their independence), I forced myself to stay put.

Me:  "If you need me, come upstairs.  You know where I am."

Boy #2:  "But - but - how do I turn it OFF?"

Now I was starting to get concerned.  What was going on down there?  Still, we're only 9 days into the New Year and I had made that resolution, so...

Me:  "What are you talking about?  What are you trying to turn off?"

Boy #2:  "Oh.  It's off*.  Thanks, Mama."

Confused?

Happy 7th Birthday, Boy #2.  I love you whole-heartedly - and Life would be a lot less interesting without you to keep me on my toes...


What are your New Year's Resolutions?


* I later discovered that Boy #2 was talking about the XBox handset which he was using to pretend to control his brother (at that moment in time, a robot) and which he had inadvertently switched on.  Because that's what you do with your Christmas presents, apparently - use them for something entirely different to the function the were designed for.  This, I believe, is the 7 year old equivalent to playing with the cardboard box rather than the toy that arrived in it...

It's his birthday and I'll cry if I want to...

Boy #1 is 9 years old today.

Nine. Years. Old.

How did THAT happen?  I swear it was only yesterday that I was thinking about getting pregnant, then - once I was pregnant - found myself suffering from waves of nausea so bad I couldn't even think about looking at discarded gum on the pavement let alone be anywhere in the vicinity of frying onions.  Then, once the first trimester was over, blissfully wobbling through pregnancy thinking that having a baby wouldn't change me, not at all, and see you on the first day maternity leave is finished...

Surely it was just last night that I lay joking in the delivery room with the doctors (yes, joking - you gotta love those epidurals) about feeling like a cow and asking which was Tristran and which was Siegfried Farnham, before having Boy #1 pulled forcibly out of me - with something that resembled a hoover - and handed to me with powder-blue skin and the biggest eyes I had ever seen gazing straight into mine.

And wasn't it just this morning that we fled the noisy, over-crowded maternity ward with Boy #1 snuggled like a little bear in his maxi-cosy, to the safety of our own flat where Husband and I sat down on the sofa cradling him softly in sheepskin and asked each other, without saying it out loud;

"What now?"

Here is 'now'.  Here, with a happy, healthy, beloved and loving son who delights his parents (when he's not driving us crazy), who is an amazing older brother, and who brings so much to our lives that they are inconceivable without him.

Happy Birthday, Boy #1.  If I were any prouder of you, I would burst.  Love, Mama x