Dear Alex,

Today is your fourth birthday, although in keeping with how you express yourself these days, I should probably say that TODAY! IS! YOUR! FOURTH! BIRTHDAY! – because there’s not a doubt in my mind that today is going to be a day filled with CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!, and your daddy and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

    
This last year has been my absolute favorite with you so far, mainly because you are such great company. There’s absolutely no place that I could go that wouldn’t be made more fun by having you along for the ride, unless of course that place is the library, in which case I would cry “UNCLE” before we ever stepped in the front doors. You’re not so strong with the quiet at this point in your life, but that’s okay because Mama understands that it’s extraordinarily difficult to convey your near-constant capital-letter excitement for OH LOOK, MAMA! SHELVES! when you’re limited to mere whispers.  

Besides, it’s not like the library is going anywhere, so we’ll head back when you’re about seven and see if we can make it more than fifteen minutes in the Young Readers section without disturbing a majority of the reading patrons. Let’s make it a date, ‘kay?

 

    
Your wide open enthusiasm and love for people is a constant source of wonder for your daddy and me, and sometimes when you’re introducing yourself to the check-out girl at Walmart or the bag boy at Publix or the person who changes our oil at the ExpressLube, your daddy and I will look at each other, grin, and delight in the realization that your extroversion is so innate that there’s no way we could’ve taught it to you. It’s who you are through and through, and even though I’ve winced a time or nine when you’ve said, “Hi, I’m Alex. I’m three. This is my friend Mama” and then ANNOUNCED MY AGE TO A LARGE LINE OF GROCERY SHOPPERS, I wouldn’t dream of correcting you, mainly because I have big plans to teach you that my actual age is twenty six and then let you proclaim it to the masses.  

 

    
Lately at bedtime you’ve decided that you like for your daddy to tuck you in and say prayers with you, and after he leaves your room you call for me to come snuggle with you. You will not go to sleep until you have had “snuggle time” with both of us, and I treasure it like crazy because I know that one day you will be thirteen and prefer that we respect your six-foot radius of Personal Space while you’re busy trying to pretend that we don’t exist.  

(Also: when you are thirteen you will read this post and roll your eyes. And then I will chase you and catch you and give you one hundred kisses. You might as well make your peace with that now.)

 

    
You like to talk when we have our snuggle time, and you often announce, as you smush up next to me and put your head on my shoulder, that it’s time for some questions. For five or ten minutes you’ll ask me about what our plans are for the next day or how far away heaven is or whether or not God made pajamas. Inevitably in those moments I’ll be overcome with emotion, and I’ll look you straight in the eyes and tell you how much I love you, how blessed I am to be your mama. Then, in the quiet of darkness, you’ll look right back at me and say, “AWWWW, SHUCKS, MAMA! I LOVE YOU, TOO!” 

And somehow, it’s just as it should be that your words shock the quiet of our time together every night, because that’s exactly what your arrival four years ago did for your daddy and me. You have caused us to sit up and open our eyes and take in the world from a completely different perspective, one that is infinitely richer and deeper and better simply because you’re here to share life with us.

I will never get over that as long as I live.

I love you so much,
Mama

For several years my daddy has maintained a webpage of his own. It’s a password protected deal where he posts pictures of grandkids, fourth cousins eight times removed, and basically every possible morsel of genealogical minutiae that you could ever want to know about our family.

A couple of weeks ago D. decided to see if Daddy had posted anything recently, and later that day when we were in the car, he said, “Hey, your daddy linked to you.”

“He did what I’m sorry huh?”

“Your daddy linked to you. He mentioned something about your blog on his webpage.”

Now if it’s hard for you to understand why I was a little shocked by this information, it’s because it’s only been in the last six weeks or so that I’ve known that Mama and Daddy are active readers of my blog. Daddy says that he has to “log on” and then pass the computer to Mama, and in fact just this last week Daddy wrote me a sweet email that congratulated me on my “recent blog awards” and went on to suggest that maybe I should “back up all of your blog posts into some sort of database, as Mother and I think that maybe one day you could compile them all into a book.”

I couldn’t help but picture me standing at a copier, painstakingly running off copies of each and every blog post, then putting the pages through a three-hole punch, placing them in a vinyl binder, and then asking Alex to put one of those title stickers he just made with some markers in the center of the binder cover. It’s sure to be a best-seller!

Anyway, I logged onto Daddy’s webpage, and after a little bit of clicking around, here is what I found:

Where do I even start?

First of all, one of my favorite parts of Daddy’s blurb is that I’m “a blogger at boomama.net,” mainly because the word “a” implies that I am but one blogger on a staff of many here at BooMama, where we toil furiously in the blogging trenches to bring you some of the very best mediocre writing you’ll ever find on the interweb.

Second, the part about him not wanting to brag? Totally sweet. I don’t care how old I am.

Third, I love it when he says that I have “a large reading audience, nationwide.” I’m not so sure about the “large” part, but when I read it I thought, “DON’T TELL MAMA THAT SOME CANADIANS READ, TOO! IT’LL BLOW HER MIND!” And then she’d call me and say, “You mean they can see your blog IN CANADA? Well I had no idea. HOW IN THE WORLD do they do that?”

I also giggled when I saw, “it is different than most of what you read,” because it’s just a little bit ambiguous about whether it’s different in a bad way or different in a good way. However, I have to admit that it definitely is different if your normal reading material is a newspaper or magazine. I mean, consider the sheer volume of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points! They don’t allow those SOPHISTICATED WRITING SKILLS in those fancy printed publications!

OH NO MA’AM THEY DON’T!

Finally, I thought it was very gracious of Daddy to point out that my writings are done “mostly on the spur of the moment” because I don’t “have a lot of spare time.”

In other words: don’t expect too much, people. She’s frazzled and crazed. SHE’S FRAZZLED AND CRAZED!

All in all, I thought Daddy’s post was delightful. Being in your 30’s doesn’t mean you stop enjoying some parental encouragement. And while I’m sure that some of my distant relatives were a wee bit horrified by what constitutes “writing” in my little corner of the blogosphere, I’m glad that a few of them might know where to find me now.

(Sidenote: if you ask my mama anything about my “website,” she’ll tell you that I have “a blog on Google.”)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to “backing up my database.”

Or, you know, watching “Little Bear.”

We’re busy as bees, people.

And on behalf of all of the writing staff here at BooMama, I want you to know that we’re going to continue to crank out as much writing product “on the spur of the moment” as we possibly can. That is what we do.

All one of us.

Last night Alex specifically requested that his daddy give him a bath; I suspect it’s because his daddy does much better than I do at playing along with submarine excursions and Rescue Heroes’ missions and other tub-time games that make little boys feel better when they’re under the weather.

So because D had bathtime well under control, I was a completely captive audience when my mother-in-law called about two minutes after Alex hopped in the tub. Usually Martha manages to catch me right about the time that I’m simultaneously trying to cook supper, feed the dogs, and convince Alex that he needs to walk as opposed to stomp when he passes through the dining room since the sound of all that china rattling makes his mama a might bit nervous and all, but last night Martha timed it just right. Since Alex was occupied, I had nothing to do but sit in front of the fire and talk. Or listen, as it were.

And I promise y’all: if there were some way that I could have recorded her (with permission, of course), I would’ve done it in a heartbeat and then posted it here, because there is absolutely no way the written form can adequately capture or convey what it’s like to listen to my mother-in-law. She is a conversational force of nature, more Southern than anyone I’ve ever known in my life, and completely capable of covering multitudes of topics in a ten minute time span. And there’s no doubt about it: between inheriting Martha’s genetic make-up as well as mine, Alex’s gene pool is brimming with some very! excited! DNA! from two different families, thereby guaranteeing that he’ll spend the rest of his days experiencing unbridled enthusiasm over, well, absolutely everything.

At least that’s what I tell myself when he’s clapping for the packages of frozen corn in the grocery store.

So last night when Martha realized that I was going to be able to talk without distractions, she was delighted! just delighted! and I had no more said, “What’s been going on with you?” before this is what I heard:

“Well, today I went to the beauty parlor, and afterwards I went to Save Rite, you know the grocery store that’s where Sack and Save used to be? Well, they had some ground beef on sale and I was finishing up at the check out when I ran into that cute little girl D went to high school with, you know the one who married the fireman named oh, I can’t think of his name but her name is oh, what is her name? She’s darlin’, just darlin’, looks just like she did in high school but I can’t think of her name, but I know she’s a nurse and works at the hospital, I mean she’s not in the towers with the offices or anything but works in the actual hospital and does a lot of the bloodwork for Dr. Jones?”

“Missy?” I said.

“OH yes, yes it’s Missy, that’s exactly who it is, and she gave me an email address to give to D. because she said she’d just lost touch with him altogether and would just love to hear from him and now get a pen so you can write this down; you’ll have to help me a little bit because you know I won’t know what I’m reading but this is what she wrote down so do you have a pen?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Okay. It’s [random series of letters] and then it’s ‘at,’ only you don’t write the word ‘a-t’ you make an ‘a’ instead and then you put one of those little swirlies around it? You know the little swirlies? That sort of go ‘whoosh’ right around that ‘a’? And then what she has next is something like a-o-l-dot-com, would that make sense? Would that be right for the email address? I mean, she just wants D to have it so he can send her the email.”

“Yes ma’am, that makes sense.”

“Well I mean I was in sort of a hurry because I’d just left the beauty parlor and we were standing in the parking lot and it was misting and my hair was falling and getting flatter by the second but she did say that she would love to hear from y’all and didn’t even know that you were living where you’re living or that you have a little boy but I just couldn’t talk much longer, I just couldn’t, because, well, my hair.”

“Oh, yes ma’am.”

“But now I did get to go to Steinmarts last week with MA and M and do you know we couldn’t find anything? We looked and looked but of course they weren’t expecting their spring lines until this week and really all they had were separates, I just don’t think they hardly even carry dresses anymore, and what I really wanted was a pretty three-piece pantsuit, maybe something in a sort of periwinkle? I mean I’d take lilac or a steel blue or maybe even sort of a cornflower blue but I just think periwinkle would be so pretty, but they didn’t have anything like that there, and M did find a cute little vest that had sort of a leopard print pattern on the vest and the collar was fur, well I mean of course it was a fake fur, a fake fur, but it was absolutely adorable and I’m so glad she found it but I didn’t get a thing. And I looked at Belk’s earlier in the week and they just didn’t have anything, and finally I went to the manager and said, ‘Look at me. Do you see anything in this store that I could wear? Because I don’t see anything for a woman who’s petite and a little older,’ and he tried to tell me that they have some lovely things, but I said, ‘Look around at the clerks who are my age. Do you see anything they could wear? Because everything is just for someone much younger than I am, and I do wish y’all would carry the Pursuits line. Everybody in this town just loved the Pursuits line when this was McRae’s, and it washed well and wore well and held up well.’ But then he told me that Pursuits was a private line for McRae’s, and doesn’t that just figure, because I just loved it, I loved it!”

“I liked the Pursuits stuff, too,” I replied.

“OH, I know, we all did, and of course they don’t carry that anymore and really everybody that I know is shopping at Dillard’s, even though they hardly ever have sales, but do you know I got a $65 jacket there for $15? And then the next day I went back and they had an extra 50% off and I got a jacket for $12? So when you hit a sale you can do really well but the problem is that they just don’t have sales nearly as often as Belk’s, but what good is a sale if there’s nothing there that I want to buy?”

And that was just the first eight minutes, my friends. We talked for almost half an hour, but if I attempted to transcribe the rest I would no doubt find myself at the hospital tomorrow in dire need of treatment for carpal-tunnel syndrome. Suffice it to say that the conversation with Martha was the absolute highlight of my day.

Also: one time, many years ago, Martha called D to tell him that he had received a UPS package from Amazon-Dot-C-Zero-M.

You really can’t help but love her.

Thank you and good night.

Here’s Alex and his newest cousin, Joseph:

And little Joseph had a mighty big weekend indeed:

It was a very sweet time.

“…Sustain him, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give him an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.” – The Book of Common Prayer