Four Years of Joy

My dearest Wesley,

Last week we celebrated four years of life, four years that have brought much change to our family and much joy.

This past year has been a big year for you.  You have now completed your first year of school, and we are so very proud of you.  As I look back on the past twelve months, I am amazed at how far you have come.  You now speak in two word phrases all the time, including your constant requests to us this week to "sing Birthday!"  You know all of your capital letters and more than half of your lowercase letters.  You are learning to count to ten, and I often hear you counting to yourself: "one, koo, fee, five, eight, nine, ten!  Yay!  Woohoo!"  You are your own best cheerleader, often praising yourself and cheering yourself on when you are working hard.  In fact, when we've asked you to do something you don't want to do, upon completion of the task, you will often clap for yourself while saying "Yay!"

This year you also learned to jump, walk up the stairs safely, walk down the stairs with supervision, and play much more safely on playgrounds.  Just this week, you climbed up the climbing wall at our park to go down the slide over and over again, determined to master the wall and so very proud of yourself every time you reached the top.  You have made great strides forward with fine motor skills, now drawing circles and crosses along with the vertical and horizontal lines we used to work on.  You do an excellent job of showing us how to draw a cross, first sliding your finger down the paper while saying "down" and then sliding your finger from left to right and saying "across".

We love listening to all the things you say now.  Last year you had about thirty words but still mostly used your picture board and communication device.  Now, you talk all the time. Instead of showing me pictures, I hear things like "eat yogurt" or "play outside" or "help please". As a result, I see so much less frustration in you because of a lack of an ability to communicate.  You tell us when you want to ride in the car, which toys you want to play with, what you want to eat, as well as who you played with at school.  You love to label things, such as "blue car" or "yellow block".  When we ask you yes or no questions, you answer them with ease, not even needing to pause to think about it.  You even tell us when you want to spin things, which is helpful since this is a behavior we are trying to curb.  Every time we drive past any fast food restaurant of any kind, I hear you calling out "eat fries" from the back seat with a hopeful voice.

I have also been encouraged recently with your willingness and ability to work more on diction and intelligibility in your speech.  Because of your struggles with oral motor skills and motor planning in general, speech clarity is difficult for you.  But as you grow older, we are able to work more on these things and are seeing such an improvement.  In fact, your love of letters has been such a help in this area, as we put together letters for you to work on sounding them out to make words.  You are by no means reading, but we are using these early reading tools to help you with diction since you love to learn this way.  We even found a fantastic app for Mommy's iphone to help with this, since using with Mommy's phone is always a draw for you.  In the past few weeks, you're slowly adding some "t"s and "s"s to your words. You now say "t-mummy" for tummy instead of "mummy", "ou-t" instead of "ouk", "s-poom" for spoon instead of "poom", and so on.  You still need that little pause to think about where to place your tongue, but the improvement is significant! We are so very proud of you!

You are such a sweet big brother, often sharing your snacks willingly and helping me to feed Liam while he is in the highchair.  You love to splash with him in the bathtub, and it thrills you to no end when he thinks what you're doing is funny.

And you are learning to play games with your big brother too.  You love to play Hullabaloo and a modified version of a Maisy Mouse matching game with him.  As well, games of chase, duck-duck-goose, and hide-and-go-seek in the dark with flashlights are always filled with much laughter from the two of you.

You have also grown tremendously this year in your ability to sit still and listen and to play independently. You now enjoy sitting in your cube chair and listening to us read you books, often listening to us read story after story.  I also catch you kicking balls around, building lego towers, stacking blocks, and building train tracks on your own these days.  Another thing you often do, which fills my heart with joy, is pull out your Bible story books from the shelf, paging through them, carefully examining the pictures, and babbling away as you are seemingly re-telling the stories you've heard me read so many times.

What brings me the most joy is seeing how very drawn you are to your Bible story books in comparison to any other book.  While you enjoy listening to any story, you will look at your Bible story books for long periods of time, often shocking me with how long your attention span can be for them.  You also suddenly have become interested in praying.  You fold your hands and sit quietly when we pray, saying "Amen" with us when we finish.  And you now repeat words to pray yourself as well.  Earlier this week, I was nearly brought to tears as I watched you earnestly pray to Jesus to help you after one failed blood prick for your annual blood draw.  After praying, you settled down, stopped fighting, and allowed the nurse to draw blood from your other arm.  Then you thanked Jesus for helping you.  Every woman in that room bore witness to how you brought your request to Jesus with the faith of a child and how Jesus answered your prayer, helping you  to sit still and obey even when you didn't want to. What a testament you were to the power of God and of His love for His children.

I love you so much, my son, and you bring such joy to my life.  I pray that this year you will understand even more of who Jesus is and how much He loves you, and that one day you will put your trust in Him as your Savior.  I pray that God will use your life to reflect His lovingkindness to all those around you, as it is evident that He is already doing.

Love,
Mommy