Happy Birthday Tucker!!!!!!!

Cutie pie Tucker is SIX today! Six always seems like a big jump to me. Five is kind of the last of the excited, in awe of new things, magic ages. I will miss Tucker being five. He is such an awesome kid. I feel bad sometimes because he almost always gets lumped in with Duncan and Dayton and I think a lot of times we forget that he is still so little. We end up expecting way too much of him b/c since there are the three boys in a row I mentally put him right with a 10-yr-old and 8-yr-old. I have been trying to remind myself lately that he is (was) only five and that I need to let him be small for awhile still. That is my goal while he is six: to remember how very little that still is and stop expecting him to act like an adult.

Anyways, onto less guilt-inducing things. Tucker just rocks. He is such a happy kid. He gets so excited over little things and always has. My mom does this thing with the boys and their cousin called Adventure Tuesday during the summer....each Tuesday she and my dad take them somewhere new that they haven't been before. Tucker talks about it all the time. And he always refers to it as Adventure Tuesday, like it's this super official thing. You can just hear him capitalizing it when he says the words.

He has always been absolutely wonderful about entertaining himself. Even as a baby he was like that. If the other kids ever end up by themselves with no one to play with they can't come up with anything to do on their own, but Tucker will just go in the toy room and start playing some game or start drawing or whatever. Very occasionally if no one is around at all he will complain that he doesn't have anyone to play with but it's super rare. He is probably my easiest child overall....not that he doesn't have his issues but I've kind of always felt like he is my little buddy here to make things easier.

This is going to sound kind of awful for me to say, but I really didn't know that he is apparently super duper smart. Since Duncan is the only one of my kids that got any real effort at education before he started kindergarten I didn't really think Tucker knew a whole heck of a lot before school started this year. But even at his pre-school year assessment last fall his teacher told me that he was way beyond most kids in numbers. And by the end of the school year he had totally surpassed the expected reading level. And his writing is fantastic! Of course he makes a lot of spelling mistakes but I can actually read almost everything he writes...I'm pretty sure that I was still guessing at a lot of what Duncan and Dayton wrote at the end of kindergarten.

As much as he does play with Duncan and Dayton and gets grouped with them in things like getting to go to my mom's house whenever they want (unlike Ellie) and getting to have sleepovers there (again, unlike Ellie) I think his best friend in the family really is Ellie. It was the greatest thing this last year with school b/c the older boys went to school at 8 but kindergarten didn't start until 11:23 (don't get me started on the wacko times) so the whole morning long Tucker and Ellie would just play or watch shows together while I hung out with Charlie. They would just disappear into the toy room or outside and play straight thru the morning until it was time to go. I really got sad as the school year ended because I knew that this was a one-time thing that wouldn't happen again. In a couple of months he will be a big first grader and Ellie will have only Charlie to entertain her all day long. So I'm really glad that they had that time together to really get to be such good buddies.

I really do tend to ramble on on these birthday posts, don't I? Tucker is just fantastic. We call him our little sunshine. I love his cute personality and all the funny things he says. He is amazing and I feel so lucky to be his mom. Love you Tuck!!