My dear son,
When the grown-ups in your life see you lately, they regularly say some variation of, “Wow, you’ve grown so much!” And they’re right—but in more ways than just inches.
How do we measure your growth? How do we chart it?
Do we capture it by how many teeth you’ve lost, how many numbers you can add in your head? Is it how short your pants have gotten, how tight your shoes suddenly are (even though we got them at the start of summer)?
Do we measure it by the way you make up your own jokes, the way you say, “How has your week been?” to our elderly friend at church, the way you make your own lunch and fix a sandwich for your brother while you’re at it?
Years and inches are easier to chart than your ability to follow assembly instructions on my new desk chair or explain the difference between a leopard and a jaguar, or your intuition that our neighbor needs a note to cheer him up.
This independence is exactly what we’ve been working toward—it’s the goal, the endgame. But it still pierces us sometimes, this growing-up version of you.
Madeleine L’Engle once said, “I am still every age that I have been,” and I think that’s true of parenthood too: When your dad and I see you, you are still every age you have ever been.
We look into your big brown eyes, and we’re transported to the hospital room where we locked eyes with our “Baby Spark” for the first time. When we see the freckles that dot the tip of your nose every summer, we can’t help but recall the toddler who spent endless hours investigating bugs on the sidewalk. When we see you run with those increasingly grasshopper-like legs, we are taken back to the moment you took those first wobbly steps, more dance than forward motion. When you ask for a sixth pancake, we’re imagining feeding you sweet potatoes in your highchair, with a success rate hovering around 30 percent. We tuck you in at bedtime, your pillow surrounded by piles of library books, and suddenly we’re time-traveling to your toddler requests for Blue Hat, Green Hat and that little truck book with the handle. We watch you march into school without looking over your shoulder and recall you on that first day of preschool, so proud with your tiny blue backpack, holding my hand with a grip that defied your three years.
So maybe that’s why we can welcome these new stages, even as we miss the old ones: We never truly have to give away those other iterations of you. We hold them in our hearts now, and we will continue to hold them as you grow up. We love every version of you: baby-you, toddler-you, preschooler-you, and eight-year-old you. And the person God is making you to be that we haven’t met yet.
Happy birthday, our beloved son.
Love,
Mom and Dad
One year ago on Christmas Eve, I was holding my three-year-old niece in church as we sang “Silent Night.” My heart was as frozen as the sheet of ice outside. I was feeling much more “bleak midwinter” than “all is calm, all is bright.” 
