To The Max

My son is funny, caring, sensitive, stubborn, smart, awkward, focused.  He loves Legos and Star Wars and, most of all, Lego Stars Wars.  He makes me unexpectedly laugh out loud and he frustrates me to the point that I  need to walk away from him mid-sentence.  Yesterday was his fifth birthday.

I call Max my "little man."  He was never a baby.  Not never.  He was born a baby, and then I blinked my eyes and he was a boy.  I put him in the pack n' play so that I could chase after Sophie, and when I came back to get him he was walking and talking and had built a 1,000 piece Star Wars ship out of Legos.  At least it seems like it all happened that fast.

When I found out I was pregnant with Max, Sophie had just turned one. I remember telling my mom that I was nervous about having two so close together.  She said , "Don't worry.  They don't come out running, you'll have time to work in to chasing two."  The thing is, she lied.  Max started crawling at five months old and walking before ten months.  Granted, he didn't come out running, but it felt like it.

We have several silly little words that Sophie said when she was little.  Words she mispronounced for years.  Max will ask what silly words he said, but he didn't say anything silly.  I started to worry about his verbal skills, which, compared to his older sister, seemed to be lacking, but he literally woke up one day talking in sentences.  I had heard of kids doing this.  I had thought the parents who told those stories were exaggerating for effect.  I wish I could remember his first sentence, but I honestly didn't realize he was talking until  it dawned on me that I was having a conversation with my two-year-old.


Yesterday my birthday gift to Max was time.  While Lily was napping and Sophie was at school, he and I played Legos.  I try to do this with him most days, but I usually spend no more than five minutes hunting for pieces (I am usually not allowed to touch the Lego creations) before I find an excuse to get up and leave.  It's not that I don't love spending time with my son, because I do, but while I'm sitting on his floor looking for a "puffy blue two" (Max has created his own Lego-lingo), I can't stop myself from thinking about all of the other things I could be doing.  Laundry.  Dishes.  Vacuuming.  Facebook .  But yesterday we sat in his room, the floor covered in Legos, for over an hour and built trucks and spaceships and cars and even a boat. 

Max is stuck in the middle and I'm starting to see what a difficult place that is.  My brother could relate, as the only boy between two girls.  For a long time I thought that being the only boy would be Max's "thing."  He isn't the oldest, like Sophie, and he isn't the baby, like Lil.  But he's the boy.  And he's all boy.  But I'm starting to worry that being the boy isn't enough.  I know he compares himself to Soph.  And he does that because I do.  Inadvertently, for sure, but that doesn't make it okay.  As a matter of fact, I've had to delete several lines of this post because I keep catching myself talking about what Sophie did compared to what Max has done and I want this to be about Max, not about Sophie.  And anytime we compare our kids, we take away from the accomplishments of the one, and give more power to the other.  And because Max has seen and heard me do it, even when it's been well-intentioned, he's now making the comparison.  And that makes me sad. 

Whoa.  This took a serious and preachy turn and all I really wanted to do was celebrate my amazing not-so-little boy.  Yesterday was a surprisingly emotional day for me.  Max turning five is a bigger deal than I thought.  He thinks it's a big deal because it means he gets to go to kindergarten in the fall.  It's more than that for me.  Being five means his chubby toddler tummy is gone. It means he thinks and reacts more like a ten-year-old than a two-year-old.  It means he can do pretty much everything on his own, including make his own lunch.  It means he is starting to form his own opinions.  Even if those opinions mostly revolve around which Star Wars character he prefers on any given day.