Luke's Lego Slumber Party

This weekend we celebrated Luke’s eighth birthday. It seems like such a big deal to me that he’s eight. I keep thinking, “He’s not a little kid any more.” In the last year there have been more than a few times that I’ve said to people “He’s only seven!” as if that was all the evidence I needed, that seven was inarguably still almost a baby. But eight feels different. I can’t imagine myself saying, “He’s only eight!” with nearly the same kind of conviction. He pulled out his baby book last week because he wanted to see the pictures of himself under the bili lights, and we got to flipping through it. We found his footprint that they made in the hospital and held his big, long today foot up to it and it was like slapstick, like when the really skinny guy tries to put on the fat guy’s overalls and he’s just swimming in them. I think I said to him, “Do you believe you were this small,” and the thing is, I hardly believe it myself! It’s so hard to remember. Why is that?

I’ve been thinking about, too, how one of the hard things about parenting is that it just keeps changing! You just start to get the hang of it, and you get this routine going, and you figure out how to handle all the craziness, and you just want to ride it because it’s finally smooth sailing, most days anyway, but then you realize your kids are another year older and if you don’t change, too, then you’ll be cutting their pancakes for them when they’re thirty. My friends Sarah & Cyndee’s oldest, Caleb, actually told them a few weeks ago that now that he’s eight he wants more responsibility! Luke, on the other hand, was not thrilled at the prospect when I told him tonight he’s going to have some new responsibilities as well. I’m sure he’s picking up on my own resistance to it. I don’t want them to grow up! It’s going too fast!

My consolation is that I think eight is going to be a wonderful age. Luke is so great lately; he’s good company, truly helpful, and fun to do things with. He is becoming a lot more positive, too, and I think more genuinely grateful for what he has. I must confess, too, that part of the charm of this age is that he has not yet outgrown his Mommy worship, so our admiration continues to be mutual. On Friday for some reason, the months I spent in Africa came up and he told me he’s never going to do anything like that because he would have to be away from me. In another conversation that day he told me he’s not going away to college for the same reason.

For his birthday I took him to our local amusement part for the day, where it unfortunately was cold and became rainy and we only stayed a couple of hours before we both wanted nothing else but to come home, put on warm pajamas and drink hot cocoa, so that is what we did. While we were there, though, we did have quite a lot of fun on the bumper cars, Luke steering and me riding shotgun and standing on the gas pedal, which he couldn’t reach. He is a pretty good driver and, like me as his age, wasn’t really interested in bumping into people, but just steered clear of the jam-ups and drove! I can so remember how amazing that felt when I was a kid at Canobie Lake Park, that feeling of driving, which felt like the best thing in the world. We rode the bumper cars three times in the short time we were there. We also went on a roller coaster (Luke’s first that wasn’t intended for little kids), the WildCat, which is an old wooden roller coaster. It was not a great one, unfortunately, and although I generally really like roller coasters there were no shock absorbers whatsoever and I found it very jarring on my spine, and it just went faster than I wanted it too as well. Maybe I’m getting too old for roller coasters. It has been a while since I’ve been on one. Anyway, Luke spent the whole time with his head in my lap and said he didn’t want to do it again, but he didn’t act traumatized and I told him I thought he was very brave to try it.

Then Saturday, the day after his birthday, we had three of his friends from school, Jack, Paul, and Ryan over for a slumber party. The five boys all played really nicely together and included Teo with no problem, which I had been a little nervous about. Teo, in fact, acted like I’d never seen him, showing off for the big boys and telling me not to help him put together the Lego kit all the boys got in their gift bags. He really held his own, though, I must say, and although at breakfast all of the boys claimed to be the “last man standing,” I think it was truly Teo who was up the latest. Anyway, it was a wonderful party and I would do it again in a second. It was a lot less work than the two-hour theme parties we’ve thrown in the backyard for previous birthdays, and the boys were all polite, kind and even pretty tidy. Tina made a red-velvet cake with red frosting in the shape of two Lego bricks, and for dinner we got the boys pizza from Barb’s with every topping they requested. This morning I made a “Pancake Birthday Cake Surprise,” a tall stack of chocolate-chip pancakes with whip cream and candles on top. The kids played Legos for hours, watched Space Balls and Scooby Doo 2, played Rokenbok, drew on themselves with the tattoo pens, and generally just messed around. They all slept in the basement on air mattresses and the couch. When parents started showing up at 10:00 this morning for pick-up, I was actually sorry to see the boys go. Although the peace and quiet in the house tonight is also a very precious thing.