Portrait of a boy at 5

We like to joke that we can plant a tree on that lip up there.  This was just a fake pout, but he does have a pretty good real one, too.

Happily, he’s much more likely to smile.  What lovely spacing on your teeth, Sim!  The dentist agrees. 

How, though, how on earth did he get to be five?  This happened last month, and I think I haven’t realized it yet.  Hannah’s excited that he’s half her age.  On his birthday, we spent some time looking at Baby Sim pictures. 

He was a cute baby, and completely placid.  He almost never cried.  In fact, he cried far more when he reached terrible twos than when he was an infant.  He is still a pretty cheerful kid most of the time.  His babyhood seems both like it was just yesterday and like it was ages and ages ago.

Building stuff is really awesome in Sim’s book.  He loves Legos.  He doesn’t love to pick them up, though.  In fact, when I ask him to pick up his Legos, his invariable answer is, “By MYSELF?!?”  He doesn’t see the logic in my answer that he got them out himself, so he should pick them up himself.

One of his birthday gifts was delivered on an evening after dinner.  It was a Lego set.  We told him he could build it the next day.  Sim usually sleeps until 6:30 or 7.  At 5 a.m. the next day, he popped up, turned on the light (thus waking Naomi, who also usually sleeps until 6:30 or 7) and began working on his new Lego set.  By the time Michael got up at 5:45 and saw that they were up, it was a bit too late to make them go back to bed…that was something of a rough morning, but he fell asleep in the car on errands in the middle of the day and so had an easier afternoon.

His interest in creating stuff extends to the kitchen.  Whenever Michael or I mention that we’re going to be cooking, Simeon immediately asks, “Can I be your sous chef?”  He can actually be quite helpful, and since I have seen the fruits of letting kids “help” in the kitchen (Hannah and Naomi are great in the kitchen), I’m usually happy to let him be my sous chef.  Sometimes the sous chef seems to take more tastes of certain dishes than is absolutely necessary…

Simeon has two very HELPFUL older sisters.  I often have to encourage them to let him do things himself.  “But, Mom, it’s faster if I do it.”  This is generally true, but doesn’t let Sim learn the skill, right?

Over the summer, Sim decided he was old enough to take his turn in the dishwasher-emptying rotation.  He was right – he can certainly empty the dishwasher.  Now that he’s in the rotation, though, he’s somewhat ambivalent about it.   

That tongue!  His tongue is out a lot of the time.  Unfortunately, when the heat is running a lot, it means he gets chapped lips, so I spend a lot of the day saying, “Tongue in, Sim.”

He’s learning to swim these days, which involves getting his ears wet.  He does not like getting his ears wet, but I think it helps that his class is 3 boys (including him) with a male teacher.  (Sim spends a lot of time around girls.)  At the beginning of this session of lessons, he mostly just clung to the wall (in the 2-foot section) and tried to keep from getting splashed.  6 weeks later, he’s putting his face in and blowing bubbles, jumping in by himself, and exchanging splashes with his fellow swimmers.

He’s learning to read.  He’s the only one of my kids so far to appreciate the humor in the stories in the phonics book without me having to point out that it’s a funny story. And he’s teaching himself to write.  He likes to write stories using the words that he’s recently learned in phonics.  For right now, there are lots of stories about cats, because that’s pretty straightforward to spell.  Sometimes he throws math in there, too:  1 CAT  2 CATS  3 CATS, etc.

Despite the fact that sometimes he feels like the lone boy in a world of girls – or at least a house of girls – Sim loves his sisters.  And they all love him.  He loves to be the first one to run up and greet Tess when she wakes up.  He loves to hang out and listen to stories on CD in Hannah’s room.  He and Naomi love to build elaborate forts or houses together with furniture, pillows, and blankets.  They don’t love to clean them up, though.  Strange.

 

He still loves to ride his bike.  He recently learned to pop a wheelie.  I don’t know where he learned this, and I could certainly have done without it.  His wheelies, at this point, are about 1 inch off the ground, but the time he decided to try one on the sidewalk (with gravel on it) right next to a busy street and fell…We had a discussion about how we do NOT pop wheelies anywhere but our driveway for right now.  And we also discussed the dangers of gravel on sidewalks for biking.  I find myself relying on the protection of Sim’s guardian angel a LOT. 

One of the things Sim is teaching me is how to let the reins slip through my fingers – maintaining just enough to help while giving him some freedom.

 

Five.  It promises to be another exciting year.