Dear ECS,
Well sweetie, you are now a seven year old. You grows up and you grows up, to quote one of my favorite movies. With the timing of your indelible birth (in May), it is so nice to be wearing shorts and sunglasses, and to put the winter coats into a different closet.
Your birthday, when you went to sleep as a six year old and woke up as a seven year old, is a great marker of growth and development and continuing to flower into a more complete and complex human. Of course, this growth happens each and every day (yes, I am jealous). And it is a continual wonder to me that this incremental growth is happening all the time and then I step back and think about where you were 6 months ago or a year ago, and you are in fact a different human, with different wants, desires and fears. That applies to us adults too, but not quite in the same time scale. At least that has been my experience.
The entirety of your growth from being the tiny, fragile human you were in 2015 to today as an adventurous, whip smart, joyful human is stunning. We don’t always step back and reflect on this immense personal evolution your life’s journey has been over the intervening seven years. We are busy! But, when I do that reflection, it is stunning.
The journey we all go through from being utterly pliable and helpless to strong, opinionated, empathetic people is really remarkable. Before Mu and I had you, I didn’t honestly think too much about the utterly vulnerable stages of my own life. But seeing them again from a different perspective has a way of rekindling your sense of life and creates a sense of gratitude towards my own parents. Thank you for that Elle.
Of course your growth, and mine, and everyone’s, is a day to day reality - not measured in years. Milestones are funny like that because we rightly use them to mark our journey but the journey is so much more than those markers. Life, as a 42 year old dude, has less milestones than your sweet, tender and incisive seven year old wonderful reality. But I was seven a long time ago and it is easy to forget that phase of my life with a lot of well earned milestones.
Keep on keeping on honey - for these big milestones and for the day to day growth that our milestones celebrate. Here with you for every step in the journey that I can be helpful.
love,
dad
dad
