Birthday

Today is our youngest son's birthday. Except that he isn't young. He's not "old" but he is definitely a grown-up.  He's staying with us for a couple more days and then on Tuesday, he will check into Navy bootcamp at Great Lakes Training Center.  He's an accomplished musician, and he's decided to go for a sound career through the acoustics of sonar in the submarine force. Whew. Wasn't he just in marching band in high school? Well, no.

We were reminiscing with him tonight about his birth. He was a born a couple of weeks past his due date and I said how each day of the last couple of weeks before the baby is born seems to last for such a long time. The hours drag with the anticipation of the birth. That phrase---"heavy with child"---is not figurative, it references those last few days. But, then, the baby is born! And, seemingly a few hours later....you look up and realize that it's been a week! How does that happen? Zooooom....he's a month old.  Zooommm....a year.

Now, it hasn't zoomed exactly, to be at this point in his life. But it is weird to realize that four of my children are now older that I was when I gave birth to them! Parts of me feel that old, but not my brain. It's interesting to be at this point in my life.

So, Happy Birthday; Anchors A'Weigh ; and here's to the next phase of your life!! 

Here he is in his very first sailor suit:

Music Man

My house is filled with the sound of guitars. Yeah! Our youngest son has been living with us for a couple of weeks. In one more week he leaves again to go to Navy bootcamp. He has decided to participate in the family tradition of being a sailor. His grandfather and his father were also Navy men. I'm so proud. And while he's here, he is making music.

I miss music made by my children. There was so much of it when they were growing up . We had years of piano lessons. Then the first one started in band in sixth grade and it just went on and on. No one took guitar lessons, but each of the three boys became so good at playing them. Several times, I'd come home from being somewhere...work, college, the grocery store...and find that an impromptu band had been set up in our living room or on our patio. High school boys who'd borrowed a drum set from the school, and then brought over their guitars to go along with the ones we owned, had a rowdy jam session going on. Or, there would be someone seated at the piano, laboring over the new book of the latest hit movie score, or maybe they'd been learning the music from an Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbuster.

I remember one of my children discovering that when they took a break in band practice, if he went over to the piano and started playing the pieces he'd memorized from "Aladdin" or "Phantom" that girls would flock to the piano and ask for requests. Popular men know how to charm the ladies through music...

Anyway, it's just nice that for this short couple of weeks, while he anticipates this new chapter in his life, I get to relive an old chapter of my life: the one when the talented people we made,  made music in our house.