This is my boy, Alec.If you, as a stranger, were to meet him, he would probably be holding onto my skirts, half-whispering, half-whining, “Hold me, hold me,” and as much as he would be shy in your presence, he also wouldn’t be able to look away.

Fifteen minutes later (or less if you were an Alec-whisperer), he would be full of giggles and words and all the ideas that seem to randomly pop into a three-year-old’s mind. He would be charming and a bit too silly, and then you would see my Alec.

There is something so amazing about knowing your own child. No one else knows them quite like you do. Of course, no one else is quite as mesmerized by them as you are either, but this is my blog, so I suppose it can feature my boy. 🙂

In the summer Alec’s love language is water; in the winter it’s fire. I don’t usually feel like a very good mom, but when I go out to light a pile of sticks and branches that Alec happily collected, I feel like a good mom. He would have a burn pile every day if he could, and one of his favorite things to do inside is to pile up all the toys in the house and call it a burn pile. Of course, that one doesn’t get lit, no matter how good of a mom I’d like to feel. His other love language is trains. He will never have enough trains, it seems. Any train is exciting to him, but his favorites are Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends. He knows the names of nearly all of them. One evening his dad made the “mistake” of telling him an “Alec and Thomas” story at bedtime, and now he has to have one every single night. Sometimes he even wakes up in the middle of the night and asks for an "Alec and Thomas" story . . . and his dear daddy groggily obliges every time. 🙂 Trains also helped Alec learn his colors. It was taking a while for him to catch on, but when I told him that blue matches Thomas and green matches Percy, etc., it wasn’t long before he knew quite a few colors!He’s been our creative little builder since he was small. One day he made me a birthday cake and had me come sing “Happy Birthday” to myself before blowing out the candles. 🙂He seems to be outgrowing simply playing with toys, and I’ve had to come up with other things for him to do this winter! He works on a preschool book when I remember to help him, and he’s also discovered coloring and doing puzzles.He loves to be helpful. He's known how to fold washcloths since he was sixteen months old, and when I remember to have him put away the silverware, he does a great job. He also loves to help me make cookies, bread, bars, cake, and anything else that involves dumping and stirring. We've lived in this house for over a year now, and I think there's been only one time that I've baked without his help. Maybe in a few years I'll have worked myself out of a job! I could look forward to that. 🙂

As soon as he's big enough, I'm sure he would love to do the laundry for me as well. He absolutely loves watching the laundry "go round," so much so that he asks me every day if I’m going to wash. One day I needed to hold Sebastian instead of doing laundry, and he said, “Don’t spend time with the baby. You should spend time with the washer.”Another favorite thing is playing with his “amusement park” dad after supper. For a while, it was being pulled around on the floor in a blanket. It's become far more exciting since then. I don’t have pictures, only videos, of the latest rage, but Eric lifts him up in a blanket like a swing and spins him around in circles, up and down, twisting and turning, around and around and around. Alec used to get dizzy, but he’s found an incredible balance after all that spinning and can walk a straight line almost immediately afterward! Dad is going to have to up his game pretty soon.Alec’s favorite snacks these days are gum, oranges, and lollipops. Fortunately, he doesn’t get them all nearly as often as he’d like. 🙂 The other day Sebastian got up to the counter and was eating cake with a fork that had been left nearby, and Alec thought it was so funny. "Mom, Sebastian's eating cake with a fork!" I actually didn't believe him right away. 🙂  I later found Alec up at the same counter eating cake, minus the fork. Oh dear.He does love having a little brother, most of the time. Some days they play so nicely, and I think they're just the cutest things in the world.Other days it seems like all they do is fight. Like literally fight. I’ve never seen such little people going at it so fiercely. It would be funny if I wasn’t the one who had to break it up every time and if someone wasn’t always in danger of getting bitten or scratched or pushed over. “You’re dead,” is the insult of the day around here, and it gets said far too often. Just the other day, I heard a piercing scream in the living room, and since that unfortunately is not a very rare happening in our house, I didn't even look up right away. When the screaming didn't stop, I went to look, and there was Sebastian taking the longest, biggest bite out of Alec's arm. Honestly, I hit a point almost every day where I think I'm just going to go crazy. There's no end to the getting into things, to the fighting, to the just little-boys-being-little-boys.

There are really sweet moments, too, though, like when I wasn’t able to read Sebastian a book like he asked for and Alec offered to do it with him instead.Alec literally doesn’t take a nap anymore unless I give him a melatonin gummy beforehand, so most days he lies in bed and listens to an audiobook. He’s listened to the entirety of the Ramona Quimby series and is working his way back through it a second time. It’s been a wonderful quiet-time occupier for him, except that he comes out saying “I’m the baddest witch in the world,” (just like Ramona) and “Shut up!” (just like Beezus). Needless to say, he’s had a little extra instruction on things we should and shouldn’t say. Which still hasn’t stopped him from endlessly making up words, but at least “bumcake” doesn’t sound as ugly coming out of the mouth of a three-year-old as “shut up” does.

As anyone who gets my Christmas letter every year knows, it wouldn’t be a post about Alec without listing some of the funny things he’s said lately.

After reading quite a few Old Testament stories during Bible Time, he asked me, “Haven’t you ever seen a big Amalekite, Chayli?” He was rather disturbed to find out that neither of his grandpas had ever seen an Amalekite either.

After getting reprimanded for throwing something, he said, “That was not throwing; that was just hilling,” with a very demonstrative swoop of his hand to pantomime a hill.

He was playing with a big rubber ball, and it kept getting away. I saw him hold it close and heard him whisper, “I have to throw you, little sweet honey. Don’t run away.”

“I got so frustrated, I just wanted to go back to bed!” That sounds about right, little boy. 🙂

“I like Daddy so much. He’s a sweet one. I will cuddle with that squishy daddy.” That sounds about right, too!

He needs a bit of work on his theology . . . When he heard Daddy was bringing home sand for the long-empty sandbox, he said, “Oh, thank God! I will obey God. I will not disobey any more, not ever again. I will not pee in my pants, and I won’t bite Sebastian. I will not bite anyone in the whole world. I will just bite snacks.”

Alec has also figured out what things will keep certain other things from happening. Sometimes when it’s bedtime, he tells his dad, “Call Uncle Alex.” And one day when I told him it was time for Bible Time, he said, “I’m not ready for Bible Time. Go do your hair.” I told him I’d already done it, and he said, “Go do it again. Brush your teeth.”

The things to write down and remember are so endless these days, as are the days themselves. It’s hard to remember sometimes that these are the good, old days, but I also have no idea what I’ll do when instead of three and one, my boys are twenty-three and twenty-one.

I'll let them read my blog posts about them, for one thing, and I hope they'll realize how very, very loved they were, even in the middle of the hard.

Because three and one are so hard sometimes . . . but they're also so sweet and so beautiful.

Stay tuned for My Boy, Sebastian. 🙂