Spidey, Unmasked
If you told me six years ago that I would be even more pathetically in love with this kid today than I was back then, I would have called you crazy. I also probably would have snorted a little, because I snort when I laugh suddenly, and it isn’t very pretty. I also would have told you that you were wrong, because I was pretty hopelessly in love as it was.
Six years ago, I was absolutely crazy about my Bug. I didn’t think it was possible to love someone so severely. Back then, he was small and squishy and needed me above anyone else. We spent every moment together, and for the first two years of his life, he was essentially just an extension of myself.
I got to watch him learn how to do things, simple things like crawl and chew and spell his name. Now, he runs and swallows his food whole and reads words like “universe” and “paleontologist.”
I am mesmerized by his wit and honesty and charm, things that were hidden in his then-evolving personality when he was just an infant.
He used to make me laugh by blowing spit bubbles or by startling if I made a sudden noise or by dancing with his Dance-and-Shout Elmo. Now I laugh at his knock-knock jokes or his sweet “rap-dancing” moves or the clever way he acts out an entire scene from a movie just because I got out the camera. He astounds me by remembering something I might have said in passing six weeks ago, and things about all ten thousand types of dinosaurs he has learned about, and how to spell words that don’t look the way they sound, like “school” and “why” and “special,” and every book, in order, of the Old Testament.
He makes me laugh harder than anyone I know, he boggles my mind with facts he reads and retains like a sponge, he warms my heart when he asks me, every night, to cuddle, just for one minute, and he makes me question the capacity of my ability to love, because how do you quantify something infinite and ever-expanding?
He grows, everyday, more and more confidently into the young man he was designed to be, a young man full of compassion, integrity, intelligence and humor. He is on a steady path to greatness, and I am daily surprised that I, of all people, get to be his mom.
Meet the Buttrams 