My sweet boy,

You’re an entire hand-years-old now. I remember being five. I remember being able to use my whole hand to indicate my age. And now I have a child who can also do that. The old saying “time flies” could never be more true than when you apply it to your children. In a blink, you went from a wrinkle, red-faced infant to a toddling little baby to a full-on little boy. You’re curious, smart, inquisitive, and funny. (You also throw tantrums and have a hard time sharing with your sister, but I think that is true of most kids. It’s a constant work in progress over here.)

You love all things farming. Last year around Christmas, you got a toy farm catalog and it became your favorite book. You took it in the car, you read it in bed, you carried it with you everywhere. Being that it was just supposed to be a Christmas catalog, it quickly started falling apart from constant reading. But you still carried around all the pages and you knew exactly where various brands of tractors and combines and grain carts and wagons were within the torn book.  You have a plethora of farm toys already in the house, from 1/64 size to 1/32 size to LEGO versions of farm machinery, but you are constantly wishing for more.

Last week, while we were in Puerto Rico, you got to stay at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. Because of the timing of planting in the spring, harvesting fell right over the time we were gone, which meant you got to be out in the fields long after the sun had set (even eating dinner in the combine which you thought was especially fun). When asked what you want to be when you grow up, you immediately respond, “A farmer!” You know more about farming than I do (which probably isn’t that incredible, I guess, but I do have my own share of knowledge having grown up on a farm), in part because you love to watch farming shows on YouTube. Who knew there was a whole following for YouTube-famous farmers with GoPros?

And though farm machinery is for sure your bread and butter, you also have vast knowledge of trains and construction trucks and, as a result, I can easily tell the difference between a back hoe and an excavator, a front end loader and a bulldozer. When we drove out to Ohio this past summer to visit cousins, your grandma laughed when I’d be driving along and randomly say something like, “Henry, look over there! There’s a skid steer loader and a John Deere tractor!” My brain has long been trained by now to notice anything with wheels and tracks.

You love to read and have surprised us all with your ability to read. I don’t know how it happened—we never taught you so we claim no credit—except that we’ve been reading books since you were a baby. But somewhere along the way, you learned how to sound out words and we have long graduated from early-readers to chapter books. We are currently on our third Laura Ingalls Wilder book (we still read that to you; it’s wordy with no pictures) and you often read to yourself or us from Frances books, Curious George, Frog & Toad, your Bible, and any picture book in your collection (or from the library). I remember a time last winter when I thought you had just memorized the books you were so easily reading so I went to the library, got a bunch of books we had never seen before, and gave them to you as a sort of test. As it turned out, you just started reading them out loud, thus disproving my theory entirely.

You are in your second year of preschool; next fall you’ll start Kindergarten. You love your teachers and it is a joy to see you loving to learn. You are introverted by nature; you refuel by being in your comfort-spaces either by yourself or with just our family. But we are working on getting you more comfortable making friends and staying engaged, even if they aren’t interested in the same things you are. This fall has been a tough one though with your best friend since birth (technically, I think you were four months old when you met) moving across the country in the late summer. We both lost our best friends on the same day and I don’t think I’ll ever forget how your body shook against me and our tears mixed on our cheeks as we left the park after saying our final goodbye. It was sad and we all felt a little lost for a long time. I wanted to shield you from that feeling of loss, but…how? In the end, better to feel it and mourn it than to stuff it away without ever processing. You are the kind of kid who would rather have one close friend than fifteen semi-close friends. Having school start back up shortly after they moved was a godsend because it, by nature, surrounded you with lots of other kids your age to play with and gave you plenty of things to think about and learn and do, filling the obvious void of summertime play dates with your best friend. The absence of him in your daily life has forced you to form new friendships though and, as a parent, while it’s hard to watch your pain, it also fills me with pride to see you working to form other friendships.

Your built-in friend is also your constant antagonizer: your little sister. We never know if you guys are going to burst into fits of giggles over an inside joke you have or if you’re going to be fighting because you both want the same color of cup. I know sibling relationships can be hard and Lord knows they are filled with lots of ups and downs, especially in childhood, but the moments of peace and laughter and caring are such a joy to witness. I pray that you two will always be close; that, even as adults, you’ll treasure the shared sibling secrets you have, the built-in friendship that you gain simply by being in the same family.

I hope you have the best birthday, my little Henry Pie. Not a day goes by, even in the fiercest of parenting storms, that I am not incredibly grateful for you. You made me a mama and you flipped our world upside down with a love we didn’t even know existed. It continues to be an honor and joy to watch you grow, even while you’re going about it too quickly. The world is a lucky place to have you in it.

I love you with all my heart.

Mama