Signs of Growth

​The boys are aging, ever so slowly but with undeniable upward progress. 

James, who asked to borrow a tie for the orchestra concert that he attended last Friday, approached me confidentially the day after and told me that he really liked wearing some nice dress clothes and would it be possible to get him some more?

It was possible, and he has a blazer, a proper leather belt, and his very own striped silk tie heading his way. (Now he’ll need to learn how to tie it on his own.)

Owen continues to pound away at the piano as soon as he wakes up in the morning, as a formal part of his school day, and in an exploratory and informal manner whenever he passes it. I cherish no hopes of him going into music professionally—if anything, I’d try to steer him away from it. But it gives me undeniable pleasure to hear him picking out melodies he knows in increasingly difficult keys, to hear him making up basic left hand accompaniments to his ear tunes, and to be pushing further and further outside the lines of basic diatonic harmony.

And Felix is the most overtly resistant to growing up. He declared that he can’t read, he sucks his fingers defiantly, and he still carries Big George everywhere he goes. But he only plays the baby when he is with us. Increasingly he is the older kid who assists with looking after the small ones at church, and despite his best efforts to evade and stall from his schoolwork, he described cars that we pass on the highway with fanciful pronunciations of their license plates and a description of their gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter, depending on the sex of the driver) and number (singular or plural, depending on how many people are riding in the front seat.)

They are all looking very tall.