Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Aidan Paul Carter certainly heeded Ben Franklin's call - he is early to bed and early to rise. It has made him Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise:

He is HEALTHY! After fighting a fairly rare autoimmune virus, Henoch-Schonlein Purpura, for over a year (typical and expected duration = 6 weeks!) Aidan received a clean bill of health - NO HSP VIRUS - at his well child check up this past week. What wonderful news! I can finally put aside the nagging worry in my mind, the back burner that constantly simmered, "Worry about HSP virus." No longer! I am grateful today more than ever for our three very healthy children.

He is WEALTHY! Um.... okay, not really. But he has a wealth of new knowledge, now that his first grade school year is officially over. I'm so proud of my school boy. He is studious, inquisitive, curious, creative. He could not possibly make his teacher-mama more proud, and I'm grateful to Mrs. Jackson for helping Aidan enjoy such a successful year under her guidance and quiet tutelage. I look at him in quiet amazement sometimes, as he works out a math fraction or presents a different viewpoint I'd never even fathomed. I am grateful to her, too, for providing me the opportunity to work in her classroom every week, rotating among the reading groups and playing "reading specialist" for an hour each week, treating me like a colleague and a professional all the while. Above all, being in that first grade classroom week after week humbled me and challenged me in ways I hadn't experienced in a middle school classroom. Thank you, Mrs. Jackson!


And he is WISE. Seven years wise! Aidan's birthday was a day full of partying. We embarked upon my parents' boat for a breakfast cruise, complete with candle-topped donuts. Aidan used his brand new fishing pole to catch his second-ever fish, which we later used to create awesome fish print t-shirts. (Official name for fish print art = Gyotaku). Later that afternoon, Aidan celebrated with his two closest buddies and his two best brothers. We took the kids to a local fused glass art studio where they each created suncatcher masterpieces. Afterward, we dined on pizza and cake, and finally topped the night off with a sleepover - the first one Aidan had ever hosted.

Flipping through photos of Aidan's birth, it's hard to imagine that the tiny baby in the pictures is the same beaming boy who stands before me today. At the same time, I cannot imagine a time that I don't think of him and remember what it was like to hold him, this boy who first made me a mama, this baby whom I love beyond measure. Robert Munsch's singsong refrain could not be more true: "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."