17 years ago...

Today is Will's Birthday!

SEVENTEEN!  AHHH!

This is another of those moments where I wonder where all the time went?

Gah.  I'm starting to get old.

Will was born in the wee early hours of May 23, 1996.  For those of you who didn't know, I actually chose to have a home birth.  One of the craziest things I have ever done in my life.  And yet, one of the best, too!  It was such an amazing experience!

And he was such a BIG baby!  9 lbs. 4 oz.

Then he was such a skinny and lightweight kid.  There was a time when he was on doctor's orders to GAIN weight.  Yeah.  The rest of America is struggling with childhood obesity and I'm buying protein shakes for my son to drink with his meals.

Will was the antsy kid who was loved by his teachers, despite aggravating them to death.  I remember one elementary teacher telling me that he purposefully asked Will a question he thought Will couldn't answer because he had been sure Will hadn't been paying attention.  The teacher was trying to trip him up.  Will gave the correct answer.

Because Will is wicked smart.

His mind makes the most intuitive leaps I've ever seen.

We were working together on his pre-calculus the other day, and I was struggling to wrap my mind around a particular equation.  I can't remember what it was, exactly, but it was full of sines and cosines and angles and variables.  He suddenly burst out with, "Oh!  It's just like y=mx+b!"  Once he said it, I could see that he was right, but my mind probably would have never made that leap.

I'm better than he is at the routine, mundane algebraic mechanics, but his mind wraps around the abstract parts of higher math in a way that makes me almost jealous.  It makes me sad that he says he dislikes math.

As a kid, his favorite TV show was NOVA.

Now Will is pushing 6'2".  He is still super skinny.  But muscular too, in a wiry kind of way.  As he finishes growing in height, I'm pretty sure he'll spend his late teens and early twenties filling out and getting more broad chested.


*****


For his birthday today, Helena and Matt took him to see the new Star Trek movie.  Once everyone was home, we picked up Will's girlfriend, Brenna, and we all went out to dinner.  Will's dinner choice was Hibachi House.

Once home again, we did a rather horrific rendition of the "Happy Birthday" song (no, really, it was bad) and embarrassed the crap out of him before giving him his presents.

My present to him will be a laptop.  We are going to sit down and find one together.  The nicest refurbished one that I can afford.

Bill's present to Will is a rifle.  Sort of.  It is more of a loan than an outright gift.  It is an old gun that has been in Bill's family a long time.

Now Will is doing what he wanted to do all along for his birthday... spending time with his girlfriend.  He and Brenna are downstairs watching "Mission Impossible".  Helena has gone home, Matt is off in his room, and Bill and I are in the living room being old people (I guess).

But he will always be my little boy in my heart.

I love you, Will!  Happy Birthday!