My longtime readers will remember the birth of our only son (after four girls), back in 2004, right before things started to get a little hectic and lead us down a rather new and different path. Well, hard as it is to believe, two and a half years have passed since his birth, and I'm finding myself with a daughter a scant year and a half from being officially a teenager, and a son quickly transitioning from toddler to preschooler.

Quinn is, as have been most of our children, quite a precocious little toddler. With four older sisters, he gets a disproportionate amount of mothering...but I have no doubt he will know how to treat a lady properly when he is old enough to have such interests. He has conclusively cemented in my mind forever the fact that boys are quite definitely, quite decidedly, different than girls. If he is awake, he doesn't like quiet, and he is ever willing to do his part to help determine that things never get too quiet around our house.

Quinn is a little sponge, and a little philosopher. After our lecture to our girls, who were playing BAREFOOT on the hill today, Quinn followed through with a lecture of his own, composed of bits and pieces of what he had heard us say over time. He warned them of all the critters, and, if my ears heard correctly, I think I might have to check for a dinosaur up on the hill. Quinn says it's there, anyhow.

Quinn is right now at the age I have begun to feel is the most fun as a parent: the age where he's filled with wonder and just old enough to express it. At our community's candlelight Christmas Eve service, Quinn broke the reverent silence of the small country church with an audible "wow!" when the lights were shut off and the church was filled with the light of candles. How awesome it must be to be able to express one's sense of wonder without social rules and other people's ideas of what is or is not appropriate to hold you back. How awesome to be able to voice what most of us must suppress in our quest for social acceptability.

While Quinn is quite free with his opinions, he is held back with his limited vocabulary. When someone offends him, he is quick to respond, through tearful replies, that "so and so do everything". He can't express what exactly it is that they did, but he can express that it irritated him by demanding they did "everything". It has become a bit of a family catch phrase. No idea where he got it, but it so succinctly and accurately sums up the way we tend to feel when someone hurts us.

The more my children grow, the more I am awed by the process of childhood. The process of watching an individual grow from a helpless infant with limited ability to express their feelings to an adult with the ability to make choices, to affect their universe, and to become individuals. And the more I am impressed with the awesome privilege I've been given to raise these individuals.

So much has happened in the two and a half years since Quinn entered our lives. And yet that time has passed by in just a blink. There is so much more to learn, so much more to discover, and I'm forever grateful to have my children to discover it with me.