Five, finally!

Well, I feel bad. It's been more than a month since Andrew turned five, and I'm just now getting around to posting about it.

In my defense, we had weeks of ice, snow, pneumonia, and more ice and snow. Snow drifts and ice patches on the driveway. There were days and days of bad weather, days and days of fever, stomach bugs, antibiotics, sleet, trips to the doctor and to the children's hospital, and other general unpleasantness. Then there was rain. Lots of rain. Clouds, clouds, darkness, rain. Then we had spring breaks.

Then there was the day I dragged the (sick) boys to Publix and told them they could pick out anything they wanted to eat--because I just wanted them to eat something, anything. Andrew spied the bakery counter and eagerly picked out doughnuts with chocolate frosting and sprinkles after first peering at me skeptically because he thought I'd lost my tiny little mind. Which maybe I had. But I bought the doughnuts for both boys. When we got home, I ripped open the bag and tried to hand them to the boys. They both sighed and said no, thanks, they really weren't hungry and didn't feel like eating. My sons. Did. Not. Want. To. Eat. Doughnuts. Did I mention the chocolate frosting and sprinkles? I was looking around frantically for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.They turned down doughnuts.  That's how sick they were, one of those dark late February days.

William attended one-half day of school in three weeks.

If this all sounds very stream-of-conscious, that's pretty much the way that the last two weeks of February and most of March have felt. It's been a long season, let's just put it that way.

So! Andrew turned five years old right in the midst of all this. He was five on February 24, and he couldn't be more delighted about it.

I can't quite believe it myself. Five! It seems like just the other day that William was five. We got our last book in the mail in February from Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. I got the info about registering him for kindergarten, too. And he qualified for the school district's gifted program.  This is happening. Andrew is five, and there's no turning back.

For his birthday, he asked for a little toy bird that plays music. He named this little green songbird Pear, and it's his new best friend. He used some of his birthday money to buy a companion for Pear--a little blue bird that he immediately named Blueberry. David and I had never even heard of these little toys, but Andrew knew all about them and knew that's what he wanted. And sure enough, he plays with them all the time. I think I was like that about my Strawberry Shortcake dolls at about the same age.

Sadly, we had to cancel his birthday party a few days later because he woke up with a high fever on the morning of his party. He had been looking forward to it for days and days, and I felt awful about cancelling. But what could we do? You can't take a child with a 103 fever to a birthday party and expose everyone else to what we eventually determined to be walking pneumonia. He and William were still recovering the next weekend, so we didn't wind up rescheduling. I am still feeling guilty about this. I wish we could have found a way to have the party, but it was just not going to work out. Ack. Like I said, I still feel bad about this. Five is such a great age...and a great age for birthday parties, too. Ack ack ack.

So a belated happy birthday to sweet Andrew! You're five and fabulous! And you have an exciting year ahead of you.