I can't believe Liam is four years old today. On one hand, it's flown by so quickly, but on the other hand, it feels like he has been here forever. How many cliches can you fit into two sentences?
He is four years old, and I can't for the life of me figure him out. He's a different child and keeps me on my toes all the time. He's an entertainer. He's funny. Ever since he uttered his first word ("hot"), it was apparent that he had a natural sense of how to use inflection in the name of comedy. He has an attention span of about 2 seconds before he deems something "hard work," but he'll sit there for half an hour coloring in a picture, little by little, using every crayon in the box, and he'll stay in the lines. He can carry a tune, and he can act out quite the dramatic death scene. More artistic, less academic.
We went to his class yesterday to share cake and goody bags with his friends, and then we stuck around to watch him play with his friends on the playground. He's a leader. A total class clown. All his friends looked to him to see what they were going to play next.
All this is tempered by a great deal of social anxiety. In the midst of cutting up with his friends, someone bumped into him by accident, and he took it so personally he almost fell apart. He's completely in his element with his classmates, but introduce him to a new environment, and he crawls into his shell. We went to a birthday party at Catch Air a couple weeks ago for one of his classmates. All his friends were there, but he was so overwhelmed by all the chaos that he clung to my leg for the first 45 minutes. If we go to the McDonald's Playplace and there are more than just a couple kids, he won't play.
One of his teachers wasn't there this week, and although he loves his other teacher and all the other kids, he cried all...week...long. I would watch him on the video stream, and he was always sitting outside the group unwilling to participate.
If he's got such a knack for entertaining, I'm not sure how to give him the confidence that he needs to help that flourish. When we send him to Kindergarten and completely turn his world upside down in a year and a half, I'm not sure how he's going to make his mark when he's completely inhibited by his shyness. I think he does so well with the current group of kids because he's been at this school since he was an infant. Many of the kids have changes, the teachers have changed, and he's moved from classroom to classroom, but there have been enough constants to keep him comfortable and secure. Maybe we need to make more of an effort to get him exposure to different environments and different groups of people. It's just hard because you can't convince him to venture off. Most kids you could leave in the church nursery and they'll quit crying when you're out of sight. I know we'd get back after church and find him the same way we left him.
He's just such a bright light in this world, and all I want is to see him shine in whatever way makes him happy and successful. We're a little stumped right now. I know we'll muddle our way through and figure it out as we always do in every other aspect of parenting. Or perhaps we are overreacting and it'll work itself out on its own in time. I don't know - I don't know much of anything, and I kind of like it that way. Parents who take themselves too seriously drive me nuts. The only thing I know is that I love that boy to the end of the universe and back. That's all I need to know, and the rest will fall into place with as little or as much effort as it takes.
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