Ephraim is 6 and Mum is gonna weep a bit!

So, I know that it is a wonderful thing that my son is growing up. I, more than most parents know this, as shadowing his growth I have my first child. She was born just over three months before him and forever remains eleven weeks old. I think, actually, it is the fact that she is frozen in time that sometimes makes his landmarks a little more difficult. A fact that is deepened by their closeness in age.

I know that there is a reason that mother nature designed our bodies to gestate children for nine months. Clearly a good reason is the spacing of children, another may be the parents emotional need to get a tad more sleep than a newborn affords (which, as a parent who had children with newborn sleep patterns for four years, let me tell you... that one makes you nutters!) and perhaps a woman's body just needs to heal from birth trauma. One other thing... perhaps your heart needs a little time to toughen up once it's been ripped apart if something happens to that baby.

My gestation was 22 days, I guess. Maybe it it was the exact gestation that his birth mother had... or it was only the two days that I knew OF him before I went to him and made him my child. It was funny how naive of the foster care system I was, I went and tried so hard not to love this little baby but I adored him fully from that moment when I first saw him and burst into tears. No universe could have been so cruel as to rip him from my arms, and it didn't. I worried about it frantically at times, I swore I would flee the country with him in order to keep him because he was my baby and nobody would take him from me. Nobody tried.

Nowhere in any of that is there mention of the fact that they told me he would be blind and profoundly retarded. I wasn't able to hear that amidst the bone crushing adoration that I held deep inside for this fat little moon baby who was mine from the start. And, today he is neither blind nor retarded. He has some trouble with his vision... but he can see without his glasses well enough that you have to pay attention for awhile to notice that he has an issue at all. And, he has some trouble with his cognition, but he's brilliant academically, and he's social and can be so sweet... again you have to pay attention to see that when he has a behavioral short circuit, he's simply trying to tell us something that he hasn't figured out a way to even recognize himself yet... let alone express. He also has the WORST handwriting in the world. So, he has decided that he will only write in Korean. That's all well and good except nobody has ever TAUGHT him Korean, and none of us know how to read Korean. But other that that... my kid's AMAZING!

Wow... that was quite the emotional tangent I went on, my little emotional voice inside my head shifted and everything! The point of all of that, is my moon baby is SIX FRIGGEN YEARS OLD!!! I got pretty sad, but now he's so cute and happy, how could I not be happy too? Today he was really cute and told me that he feels really good inside because we got him such nice things for his birthday. Go materialism! (I'm not entirely kidding, he IS a bit of a consumerist... but we can only do what we can do!) He especially loves the accordion that Mimz got for him! Judy and mama love it too!