A letter to my {almost} birthday boy

Dear Tucker,
You were the best birthday gift a mother could ask for -- healthy, although we didn’t know it right away, and so handsome.  Such a blessing, the way you put so much happy in March seventh.  You bend all our days and weeks and years toward joy.  You are, and always will be, one of my very favorite people on the planet.

Five was like phosphorescence, blazing brightly and then vanishing in a blink.  And now you are six.  You are the smartest, most sensitive six year old I know.  You got a lot of lessons at a young age; you know that people are the point of life, but also that people can disappear.  You are attuned to the reverberations of both the beginning and the end.  Your intuition into the struggles of others stops me in my tracks and your enthusiasm toward every living thing ignites my own.  You are so good at seeing the world in all the ways.

Your mind accommodates a seemingly inexhaustible catalog of Minecraft details/Captain Underpants plots/Spanish phrases/presidential trivia/Lego structure ideas/Angry Bird strategies/insect facts/et cetera and so on.  Your soul glows with some fundamental kindness, and your spirit shines with curiosity.  You absorb words like sunlight, somehow understanding most of the new ones that fall along your path.  Your hair smells a lot like dusk in the summertime, and there's usually some dirt under your nails or behind your ears.  You have a future full of activities and adventures and dreams you haven’t even dreamed of yet.  Keep growing at your own perfect pace buddy, and I’ll do my best to keep up.

I am certain I've learned more from you than you'll ever learn from me, but my advice at six is this:  Do not ever go to the mirror for a glimpse of something valuable.  You might miss it, and you need to know it’s there, always, whether you see it or not.  Look instead at the sun and know that you are brilliant.  Look at the birds and believe that you can go anywhere, too.  See the stars at night and imagine your own dots connected, one day at a time.  And if it’s cloudy, look again -- their persistence gives you all kinds of chances to finally see them, and invites you to be persistent yourself.  Build a ladder up there and climb on every rung.

I love you to the end of the earth, big boy, and then one very large step beyond.
Mama