Amazing kid (August 17)
Today is Lucas’s 8th birthday. Over the past few weeks we keep saying to 
each other, “has it really been eight years?!?” I’m sure kid birthdays have a way of doing that for a lot of parents, but when your kid has been through what Lucas has — barely surviving the first week of his life, living with a tracheostomy and ventilator, a near-death experience when he was three… I could go on — it feels even more triumphant that we’ve made it this far.
We also find ourselves getting nostalgic about his different phases of his life, which are often fueled by the fact that we have a 2 1/2 year old who is going through similar stages. “Remember when Lucas was two and he demand that we read the same three books over and over again, and therefore could recite them from beginning to end as if he were reading it himself?”… “Remember when he was Ida’s age and loved his Roy and Silo penguin figurines so much that he carried them everywhere?”
More than anything lately, watching Lucas hang out with his suddenly much-more-interactive sister has been wonderful.
The other day we got Lucas in the bathtub and Ida insisted on getting in with him… which, as both of them grow bigger, proves to be somewhat of a challenge. But we pulled it off, and then watched as they had a hilarious exchange about the plastic dinosaurs that Ida brought along. She went through them one by one “ceratops… kylasaurus… stegasaurus… rackisaurus… t-rex!” holding each up to Lucas as she named them. And Lucas just beamed. In fact, he turned red with joy and could hardly speak he was so proud of her. Finally he managed to sputter, “she knows all her dinosaurs!!” Then Ida started plopping them one by one into the water and saying, “down he goes… and swiiiiimmmm!” And Lucas turned even more red with laughter and shouted “do it again Ida!” as she grabbed another dinosaur and plunged it into the tub, sometimes smacking his leg in the process.
It’s hard to explain how happy it makes us to see them interacting in this way. There are other games that they play together but almost always with our help, and on this occasion they were going at it alone, fueling each other, cracking up. But one thing really struck me at that moment: just how amazing Lucas is to feel so much pleasure and pride in watching his sister. You could imagine it being very different, because when Lucas gets lowered into his bath chair there’s not much he can do on his own. He can’t pick up the dinosaurs himself or do much to splash around and play, except with our assistance in holding and guiding his arms. So at that moment and many others, Ida is walking embodiment and demonstration of his own limitations. Yet is he resentful or upset about it? Not a bit. To the contrary, he feels pride in all of Ida’s ability, and absolute pleasure to be able to just sit back and witness her doing her thing. What a kid. And Ida clearly sees it, too. She sometimes declares, unprompted, “I give Lucas a hug!”
