Our boy's growing up.

Pete, upon hearing the alarm waking him for his sixth birthday: "All I want to do is go back to sleep!"

(He was plenty excited about 30 seconds later.)

I don't even need to say it was a Star Wars card at this point

I yelled to Pete, who is in the next room taking a bath, that my dad (Pepa, to Pete, while my mom is Mema) said he loved Pete's handmade birthday card.

Pete's reply: "And tell him not to show Mema! Because it's only for him!"

[Pause]

"Papa! Tell him it's only for him and the cats. It's a private card for him and the cats."

Our five-year-old potato

Today is Pete's fifth birthday. FIFTH. We still discover so much about him day by day. Sometimes the discoveries are purely cool: a couple of weeks ago, we realized that we hadn't done much lately by way of prompting Pete to try reading, so I started looking at the first few pages of The Cat in the Hat with him, and boom! Those words are sticking like anything. Watching the process is fascinating. Pete doesn't have one method for figuring out words. Sometimes he's using phonics; he gets the letter-sounds, but they do only so much for him. Sometimes he recognizes individual words. Sometimes he deduces words from context, or he remembers the phrasing of the book from previous readings. (You can tell what tools he's using by the mistakes he makes.) The big picture is the amazing part: you've got one little person with almost no reading vocabulary struggling against the whole of written English, with its arsenal of tricks and misdirections. It's not fair. But Pete--and any new reader--grabs every tool in the house and tries to get something to catch. Seeing the beginning of the process, I still wonder that Pete's going to read, really read, before long. And that any of us do.

We have also figured out recently--largely on the basis of an attempt to see The Lion King in Des Moines--that Pete is unusually sensitive to loud environments, which make him something between anxious and (occasionally) terrified. We've been slow to understand this characteristic, partly because Pete generally deals with new situations well (he sailed through our 2,700-mile holiday odyssey, for instance) and partly because we don't encounter loud environments very often. But after The Lion King freaked him out a bit, we started thinking through what has made him anxious: cheering at a minor league baseball game, the buzzers in Darby, a couple of concerts, fire alarms. We had been trying to reassure him about the content of the situations, telling him the environments were safe, but that reassurance never worked because, we think, we were missing the point: the sound is itself the problem. This too is fascinating, though discovering it has been hard on all of us.

So we learn how Pete will come to be like us, as he starts to read, and that we need to understand how he's not us but profoundly Pete. But the whole five-year-old him is wonderful to know.

Four more years!

Last Inauguration Day, we were in the hospital, enduring a second day of induced labor, finally going into surgery at night. Pete was born at ten o'clock on the dot.

Which is to say, today is Pete's fourth birthday. It's hard to believe that Bush was President for two of his lifetimes. Pete has been wonderful about the birthday, exuberantly pleased at passing the milestone. On Saturday, while getting his gifts from Carolyn's family, he said to nobody in particular, "I am lucky to get so many nice presents." We feel lucky, too.

I suppose you have to like the enthusiasm

Pete had a huge day today. We had his birthday party at brunchtime, and he had a great time. Then he opened his presents from Carolyn's family, and he loved them. Then he played with the presents for a couple of ours. Fantastic. Then we went to dinner, and as it wound up, Carolyn said, "So, Pete, what was your favorite thing we did today?" Pete: "Going swimming!"

No, it's not a euphemism for death

Pete is now a three-year-old. (Incidentally, because Pete was born on inauguration day, that means the current Presidency also turned three on Sunday.) He had a wonderful birthday: he loved seeing his little friends, he loved his presents, he loved his amazing 17-car train cake from his grandparents, he loved his new fire truck and bath drums. Good thing, too, because none of us had much energy in reserve: he stayed up howling until midnight the night before and got up at six, leaving us with about four hours of sleep. In the morning, to try to get him to settle, I whisked him through the ten-below cold into the car, and we drove parallel to the rising sun until he slept just a little more--a nap that probably got us all through the day. Now, when we get in the car each cold morning, he asks whether we're taking the sleepy ride.

To the minute

from Carolyn

Pete took his first breath almost exactly three years ago (10:00 p.m.). He's really really great. I've been feeling amazingly fortunate all day. He and I even took a nap together this afternoon--something that only happened a handful of times back when he was an infant. Oh, Sweety P, we love you so much.

Tunney, tunney, tunney

From Carolyn

Pete turned two on Saturday. And he will answer you correctly if you ask him how old he is.

He's finally learning colors, or at least learning to tease us by insisting that everything green is blue. He can be quite crafty.

However, I think his repeated proud statements about his "big cup," in which he consistently replaced the final "p" with a "k" sound, were actually innocently spoken.

He traveled very well on our adventures out east, remembering how to sleep in the car and being game for new places to sleep many nights. The saddest moment, though, came the night after we drove through Pennsylvania. Pete loved driving through the tunnels along the Pennsylvania turnpike, and was very sad each time we headed out into the sunlight and left the tunnel behind. He woke up that night crying. Sometimes when he cries at night he's just fussing, but sometimes he's crying for some specific thing. If we can hear him say what he wants--water or his blanket, for instance--we'll go in and give it to him. That night, though, we heard him wimpering "Tunney, tunney, tunney." It took us a few seconds to figure out that he wanted tunnels, something we were unable to provide on the spot.

Oh, baby!

I have NEWS!

To wit:

[pip],

a.k.a. Peter Jacob Simpson (trochaic trimiter),

a.k.a. Pete,

joined us in the outside world at 10:00 (on the dot!) last night, January 20th. He weighs 7 pounds, 12 ounces, stretches out to 19 1/2 inches, and delights his parents utterly.

During labor, Pete's wee head got caught slightly out of position for the descent, resulting in a difficult stretch for him and Carolyn and ultimately a caesarian section. Everyone got through that all right, and we've now had a very good night and morning together. Carolyn is doing very well today.

We’re scheduled to be in the hospital until Monday. Somewhere along the way, I’ll be getting pictures and whatnot on the internets. There will soon be a picture here, but I don't know when.

We all thank you for your good wishes.