Meet Max, My Little Boy.

“You don’t raise heroes, you raise sons.  And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes.”

~Walter M. Schirra, Sr

I would like to introduce you to my son Max. Though I have the next four weeks of posts all planned out, it was important he go first.

He has had to wait for pretty much everything since the day he was born.

Max is our second child. When he was born, our doctor revealed (rather breathlessly) that he was a miracle baby like none she’d ever seen. Because Daisy had gone through such a difficult (and dangerous) delivery with Mia, Max was a scheduled Cesarian. Turns out, Max had become entirely detached from the placenta. Our doctor explained that if Daisy’s water had broken, the odds of us having lost her, the baby, or both were horribly significant.

Max was a beefcake. He looked like his sister  if she were inflated with an air pump. She, the tiniest little waif of a thing. He, big and grinning from day one. Max had quite the boom for a baby; it was as though being second in line had thickened his blood with a determination to never be forgotten, and a day did not pass without him demanding his place.

Our daughter spoiled us on the ease of parenting, sleeping through the night at only a handful of weeks and being altogether alert and amiable. Max screamed at a pitch that left no doubt about his demand for equality. Daisy and I used to rock him in his car seat until he started to snore, which seemed to happen mere seconds before our arms were about to melt from their sockets.

Every day when we picked him up from daycare we would ask if he was fussy. “No,” his caregivers would shake their heads in a manner that left us certain they were unceasingly surprised by the suggestion. “He was as cuddly as could be, just like always.”

It wasn’t that we weren’t aware of the cuddly side of our boy, it was just that he seemed to fully bloom only in the absence of his sister, and seeing how our family is as thickly threaded as the strands of a rope, that was a rare instance indeed.

That first year was long, difficult, and led directly to the realization that time was fleeting and the first five years with our children would fade faster than the daylight at year’s end. We left our jobs, opened our school, and gave our son the attention he’d been asking for since before he was born.

Max is now a few rungs shy of five years old, his birthday a blip on our horizon. He is in every way more than I could have ever dared to hope for in a son: strong and sensitive, easy going and determined, playful and serious, unbelievably kind… and just a little bit rascally.

Max is amazing;  the most well mannered child I’ve ever known. His “thank you” is as natural as his breath and his breath is often bursting from unbridled laughter. Max is not his real name, just a moniker I made up in my very first post seven months ago and have not ever changed. His real name sings with the character of a sonnet.

He is my little buddy and one of my three best friends in the whole wide world. I look forward to sharing him with you.

This Thursday, Max will have his first guest post on Writer Dad. If there are any questions you’d like him to answer, please drop them in the comments and I’ll pick a handful to ask him.

Writer Dad