The face of SIX!

 

 

This is the face of a six-year-old.

This is the day of chocolate chip pancakes and ice cream cake. The day of new swimming trunks and LEGOs.

This is the day we see that you are centimeter taller than when you were five.

This is the age that puts a dash of bashfulness in your pride.

This is the day I need to remember to make about you, not about me. Not about my baby born late in the afternoon five days overdue on a hot hot day in July. Not about our one year old, learning to walk, or our two year old, kicking a soccer ball. Not about our three year old, running non stop, or our four year old, talking and rhyming and building nonstop. It’s not even about our five year old, cycling and reading, reflecting, air-guitaring, big-brothering.

Today is about our six-year-old.

Six! More fingers than one hand can hold. One step further from us and towards the world.

This is the face of the boy that we loved exactly as he was, and more importantly, exactly as he is. Today.

Happy Birthday, Karel!  We promise to do our best to help you keep shining your six- year- old light into this new-old world.

 

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Karel turns 4 part 1: Where we get kind of sappy.

Our little man turns four today.

We’re already so proud of the little boy he is, and are so curious to meet the bigger boy he’s growing into…yet I’m still sitting here looking at baby pictures crying. (sigh).

These first birthdays, the early ones, are precious. These birthday that are still close enough to remember what it felt like when this talking, running, rhyming, creating boy child was still a part of my own body. These birthdays that celebrate the beautiful gift we were given 4 years ago; a gift we held to us tightly with a sense of disbelief. With the nagging feeling that we have to give him back. A gift so surreal, Bjørn wore his hospital bracelet for 2 weeks. Because it said ”Father” on it.

We don’t have to give him back, of course. Nor his brother. But they will leave us eventually. This, this, this is my weakness. This is the area where I cannot keep myself from being selfish, from shutting out everything else. I have to know them.

A lasting effect from clinic work in Malawi, maybe? The heightened perception that life — especially a child’s life — is not to be taken for granted. Not to be counted on. Do not worry about tomorrow, Jesus tells us. So we make sure to pour out our love today.

So, baby boy, if you read this years from now, I hope our actions in raising you matched our hearts. Don’t be deceived — I’m doing my best to raise you to always come home, to come back to us. I am not above tattooing ”CALL YOUR MOTHER” on your head one night while you sleep before you leave for college. And if you ARE reading this, I hope you have realized by now that not all my threats are empty. So sleep with one eye open.

Thankfully for us all, we have a few more birthdays to get through before we come to that point.

xoxo

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The Last Concert

You’ve got to respect a rocker who appears on-stage wearing a very snug suit and keeps it on throughout a frenzied two-hour concert…

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Better when it’s over

Running a marathon is one of the amazing experiences that you’d do that actually feel a lot better after you’ve done them than during the experience itself. (Running a marathon can, of course, only be considered amazing if you’re in possession of a slightly mis-wired and masochistic brain.)

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Little runner

LilleLyngstad has had an extremely busy couple of weeks. He or she never seems short of energy to expend these days (might it have to do with mother’s heroic calorie intake?) and tends to move about non-stop for hours on end. Favoured moves right now are jogging, spinning and “let’s jump/float up to the other end of the womb while throwing punches indiscriminatorily.

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