"There is nothing sweeter than a four year old boy"

, says my dear mother and I must say, this is quite a compliment to my only brother. Whatshe meant to say is that the sweetest thing is a 19 year old me (he ha)

Now that Alder has celebrated his fourth birthday (May 19), I am excited to see what she means. Jason and I have certainly seen a marked change in his demeanor and willingness to cooperate in the last few weeks. Don't get me wrong he can still be quite whiney and has started shooting back some pretty sassy "no!"s at me, but that is usually when he is fatigued.

The following are things that we would like to celebrate about Alder in this birthday week and are things that four year old boys can apparently do:

--make jokes

--play soccer, perticipate in the drills and actually care whether or not he is wearing the proper attire (stripes have been requested on shirts, shorts and socks for soccer days)

--negotiate/argue - but I really want to have more apricots and almonds before dinner, my body is telling me it is very hungry mom. And whenever he starts a statement out with " Weeeell, you Knnoooooooowwwwww..." you know he's about to make a strong case for something.

--become lost in a world of pretend people and places - especially if it involves dinosaurs or pirates and directly following a book about that subject.

--chew gum! This is something Alder has been asking to do for awhile now. I let him try it a few months ago and he swallowed it within the first five minutes. I told him he had to wait until his birthday to try again. He recieved a pack of Juicy Fruit for his birthday. Mom and Dad were not thinking about dental health when they made this purchase and will have to replace the remaining pieces with something better, eEspecially considering that he chewed a piece on Sunday for close to 5 hours. And then only discarded it because a tortilla chip did not mix well with it.

And the most fun part of this gum thing: he gets this little talkative ego boost when chewing it.....all afternoon. He'll sort of strut around and say things like "hey mom, I like gum" or "hey, that's cool" or "Hey Dad, come look at what I did in my room, yeah, yeah, its gonna be really really cool, yeah" and say lots of quirky things to himself ... So much so that when I was reading Heath a book later that day he kept pointing to different pictures saying "da cool, da cool!"

--teach little brother how to do things and then let him try...this is really a nice change from the yelling and pushing of months past. Here he is showing Heath how to use a stamp and then color it in on Heath's paper. He got this stamp set for his big day.

--Finally, he can focus longer on the more challenging tasks and not get frustrated...at least he has a longer tolerance for frustration.

In fact, we hear he has been doing some pretty difficult math works at school that require lots of concentration. The long chains of 3, 4, 5, and 6....This is a picture of a child I found on the web doing montessori long chains. You can see how he is placing number cards/arrows at intervals and in so doing counting all of the beads....Alder is getting up over 100! The kid in the photo is older and likely getting up to 1000, but you get the idea. He of course has not mastered this work yet and needs help when he transitions between 59 and 60 for example, but we are excited to see how proud he is to be working with these "older friend works".

Here we are eating his favorite meal, tacos, for bday dinner. Tacos are now barely coming in second to burritos as favorite and requested for every meal: "Weeeeell you Knnooooooooowwwww, we have all the things to make tacos."

He was not dissapointed that he did not have a cake. We made dinsaur cookies for his "Walk Around the Sun" at school on his birthday and he seemed to think this was enough. He will get a cake at his and Heath's shared birthday party in a couple of weeks....

This picture is from Alder's classroom where our family (including Heath) got to sit with his friends and watch as Alder enjoyed his Walk Around the Sun. To start, he helped his teacher to place the months of the year around the sun, a cross section of a large tree with a candle in the center. Then, he chose the earth model that he wanted, and carried the earth around the sun four times, stopping each time at May and talking about what he was doing at each year (Jason and I actually did most of the talking here). As he walked around the sun, his friends sang a verse about "Alder is walking around the sun, he walking around the room, all on this great afternoon." It was very special and made us so proud to see him so serious and thoughtful as he placed the months and walked around. He had obviously been looking forward to this first time for a long while. It was one of the things that make you think that time is moving slower in his mind than in ours.

We were also impressed by how well a group of eager-to-talk 3-5 year olds adhered to the rule of the ceremony: when it is time to walk around the sun, it is all about that person on their special day. By and large, all of them seemed sincerely interested in what we had to say about Alder as he stopped on each May. But, then again, they knew we had brought cookies.