Then & Now

For those of you who found me through another mother runner, thank you SO much for reading. This post is straight-up Mama reflection (read: bragging?) so skim or skip if you wish. I'll do more running talk very soon, don't you fret!


Here's Tommy (without the cap, holding the beach ball) on the last day of Kindergarten, June 2010. The K teacher creates the sweetest, funniest, most adorable song & dance numbers for them... with props! I couldn't have been more proud of him. He did exactly what he was supposed to, took his role very seriously, and was just.... great.

It's hard to believe that it's only been a year when I think of all the things he can do now that he couldn't do then. Here he is on the last day of First Grade... and then a list of just some of the milestones he's achieved in the last twelve months.

1. Tying shoes
2. Adding and subtracting.... often BIG numbers (He won the "excellence in math" award. What??)
   
3. Taking showers (This sounds simple. Trust me... it was a BIG triumph. Water in face = hysteria for many years.)
   
4. Reading, reading, reading! (And, more importantly, LOVING to read!)
5. Writing, writing, writing! (Also with great enthusiasm.)
6. Cub Scouting
7. Jump Rope Club (He was the happiest - and possibly the least skilled! - jumper at the end-of-year show. My heart soared!)
   
8. And, most importantly of all, he seems to have found the place in his soul where Empathy resides. (Cue angel choir.)
   

We're still working on this, but he has shown a HUGE emotional growth - especially lately - in feeling others' pain. He even "sacrificed" himself by getting got out in backyard baseball last night to make Elliott feel better after being tagged. A year ago, no WAY could he have seen his way to do that.

Where will he be, this puzzle of a Sp Ed kid, with at best a *vague* diagnosis of "developmental delay", a year from now? He'll have another year of summer theater. He'll have 2 weeks as a "real" camper. His little sponge of a brain will keep on reading and thinking and figuring things out.

My hope is that he'll stay (and grow) in this place of Joy & Empathy that he's discovered.

(And then, of course, then he'll surprise me with a problem that I never saw coming!!)