Birthday Letter to my Sweet Boy.

Dear Alec,

You recently celebrated your fourth birthday, and while it was fun and you were excited, and we ate cake and you got loads of Lego sets, and you have me actually put together the Lego sets, and you sing constantly as you sit next to me while I am building them, so that after about 90 minutes I am begging you- you whom I have guided through two years of speech therapy- to please stop singing the same songs over and over again, while all of that is true, I really have one thing to say to you in this letter as you turn four years old:

Thank you.

Thank you for your sweetness, your warmth, your love for me and your family.
Thank you for growing, even though you eat really poorly (you are still on a protein strike).
Thank you for talking and developing language- we have all worked really hard to get you where you are.
Thank you for teaching me profound patience when you have rules about something and I want to rush you through it.
Thank you for being an incredible mix of perfect rigidity and profound flexibility and teaching all of us that we don't quite have you entirely pegged yet.  Thank you for the multitude of times I was bracing for you to melt down, and instead you shrugged your shoulders and said, "Sure."
Thank you for being handsome and so beautiful to look at.
Thank you for joining choir and blowing us all away with your ability and desire to get up in front of 300 people and sing your little heart out.  With hand motions to boot.
Thank you for loving the app Hay Day as much as I do, and sharing your thrill of "leveling up" with anyone who will listen.
Thank you for loving your sisters as much as you do, but still sometimes favoring one over the other.  It keeps it interesting.
Thank you for playing soccer this fall and spending most of the games waving and winking at me and your grandmother.
Thank you for always willingly giving me "the sweetest kisses in the whole world", as I call them.
Thank you for truly being a lovely person, who is gentle and kind and smart.

Thank you for helping me get through the hardest year of my life.
Thank you for tolerating me being away for days at a time when PopPop was sick and I had to be with him. You were a trooper.
Thank you for feeling sad with me when we visit his grave.
Thank you for your prayers at his graveside.  They are amazing and heartfelt.
 
Thank you most of all for always saying something beautiful after we leave, something far beyond your years, something that always makes me wistful and sad but oh so happy that you are with me: you always remind me in some way that PopPop is watching us and is with us.

We are only four years in, you and I.  But to say I cannot imagine my life without you is an understatement of the highest degree.
Last year in my letter I said I am madly in love with you- and that is still true a year later.

You are a blessing to us and I pray that this year ahead be filled with every joyful thing you deserve.

Love,
Mommy