Five!

Today, Owen turns 5. Sometime around 2 a.m. 5 years ago, he entered our lives and Jon and I became, forevermore, parents. The past year has brought about some amazing changes. He is learning and growing by leaps and bounds -- so quickly I can hardly believe it. We had parent-teacher conferences this week and his teacher showed me Owen's book where he draws a picture of himself every month. Back in September, it was a circle head with a smiley face and five sticks of hair coming out one side. His most recent one was complete from the ears to the shoes and featured red hair and one blue eye and one green eye (his eyes are bluish-green, he says). Amazing. Then there's all the reading and writing (not much arithmetic yet). Turns out, school really does work.

It's also been fun over the past year to watch his relationship with his sister grow and change. A year ago, she was still quite young, crawling around and not that interesting to him. Now, they're great playmates (or bitter rivals, varying from second to second). One of my favorite things to overhear is "hey, Nora, want to ______ with me?" shortly followed by her little "yah." They've fallen into that natural ebb and flow of a sibling relationship.

He's still so young in so many ways -- spends the first 5-10 minutes of the day huddled on the kitchen floor whining about the bright light, gets upset over seemingly mundane things and isn't a fan of going into dark rooms solo -- but he's getting so much more mature, too. I remember, over the summer, watching him dangle his way from one end of the monkey bars to the other and thinking, wow, when did that happen? And this past weekend, seeing him so comfortably cruising around on a big bike at the Toys R Us store. But even more importantly, it has gotten so much easier to communicate with him. We have real back-and-forth conversations and he tells us stories, and we tell him things and he reacts.

We've had a fun birthday day together so far. Got a great big helium balloon at the grocery store, built a stuffed turtle at the mall and had lunch. In about an hour, we're heading to a classmate's birthday party, and then it's home for his cake and presents, so it's definitely a packed day.

Happy birthday, kiddo!