Six

I spent yesterday doing what I always do, the day before his birthday: Frantically trying to collect dozens and dozens of video snippets from a variety of recording devices, cursing myself for having so many dang recording devices in the first place, for not keeping things better organized throughout the year, and for not yet having the courage to say ENOUGH, NO MORE on the dumb montage thing. 

I came close this year. I really did. Five years seemed like a good stretch, a nice end point, and most of the video footage we took of Noah this year doesn't work with the actual audio stripped away. He's talking in almost all of it, chattering away about Star Wars and Frodo and Harry Potter and dinosaurs and Legos and school and camp and swimming and the beach and fireworks and movies and Ezra and Baby Ike and lost teeth and Angry Birds and and and.

This is the first year I've had that problem. And oh, what a good problem it is to have.

I flipped through photos instead, surprised at how much he changed this year -- you always think it's slowing down, that they are already "big" and no longer hurtling towards "bigger" as fast as they did during the first couple years, but it isn't, and they are.

Noah shot up like a weed, then bloomed, blossomed, whatever, doing so many things he's never done before that, in retrospect, this year was more jam-packed with momentous "firsts" than any year so far. He enjoyed a birthday party. He learned to swim. He discovered drawing pictures is kind of fun. Karate. Kindergarten. Lost teeth. New babies. Lost grandparents. And for the first time, he could tell us all about all of it, in his own words.

There's simply no way to fit everything into a short little video. Life is simply too big now. It's as big as he is, at a tall, gangly, talkative, frustrating, hilarious six years old. 

And oh, what a good problem that is to have.

Six! from amalah on Vimeo.

Music: 2 Atoms In a Molecule by Noah & The Whale