The Big Day

 Today a lot of big things happened!

1. Ansel turned FIVE.  Incredible.  Unbelievable.  

    After he went to bed last night, Paul and I built a little IKEA desk and chair for him, snuck it into his room, and filled all the drawers with new drawing pads, construction paper, pipe cleaners, googley eyes, popsicle sticks, watercolors, colored pencils, 100 crayons, markers, and little jingle bells for good measure because he likes them.  Also his own little desk lamp.  Also a bag of child's washable makeup because he always watches me (the few times I ever put on make up) and always gets in my drawers to "do his own".

    When we woke up this morning, his light was on which usually means he'd gotten up at 5:30am and went downstairs to play with toys.  But when I peeked in, he was sitting patiently in his bed -- "waiting for my special puppyups"  (side story: we call waffles "puppyups" now because one morning on our trip to Oregon, Paul was cutting up a waffle and said "I'm just going to eat this puppy up."  After which Ansel said, "Can I...can I have a puppyup too?")  

    He had bright pink eyebrows - which I complimented profusely - and he told me that he EVEN HAD MAKEUP MOM MY OWN MAKEUP as a surprise present and shyly said that he had been very careful to only put one color on "his eyelids".  

    He'd also already started drawing in his drawing pad and was very excited to see jingle bells in the drawer.  It was just a very gratifying way to greet our new 5-year-old on his birthday.

    After special puppyups in bed, we also gave him a little present of a remote control train, which he'd been asking for FOR MONTHS and he literally shrugged.  Win some, lose some.  At least he wanted to do my own makeup for me later.

    He also immediately asked if he could play Minecraft -- we'd been holding him off for over a year saying that he could play it "when he turned 5" and bam, he remembered.  Before Hadrian went to Karate Camp, he sat next to Ansel for an hour and taught him all the keyboard controls.  After he left, Ansel played Minecraft for 5 hours straight - absentmindedly eating bites of birthday cake and searching for villages and sunken treasure.

2. Ansel got his first COVID vaccination!

    He was so brave.  He was so quiet and was holding so much in on the way to the doctor's office.  He only cried a little bit right after it was done - like he was just relieved he didn't have to hold in his fear anymore.  The rest of the day he kept talking about how he got his shot and his special card now - he was excited to think it meant he wouldn't have to wear a mask .  And we're excited for him.  It's so good to be able to line up four vaccination cards on the table and see all our names on them.  We're almost all "there."

3. PAUL GOT TENURE!

    It's not a huge surprise.  He'd been passing all the gates throughout the year with flying colors.  We were pretty sure it was in the bag ---- but you neverrrr knowwwwwww.  And today he finally got the official letter!!  We sat around laughing about making him go through some elaborate made-up ceremony we'll call his "Jacketing" (aka when I will bestow upon him the Dublin Tweed jacket we bought him for this moment, when we were in Ireland).  Having to get past "Reviewer #2", being ceremonially struck with branches of "The Tree of Knowledge", being thrown in the chicken coop and told to catch one and hold it over his head (couldn't think of a metaphor there yet, just sounds hilarious).  Maybe we'll make that happen.  I hope so.  He's officially an Associate Prof on July 1.

4.  I got my first recruiter contacting me about a job with a $200K base salary!  I definitely will not get that job, but it seemed MIND BOGGLING so figured it belonged here.

Addendum: One more thing about Ansel that I've wanted to write down.  He loves to play "Bird Restaurant" right now.  Where he brings you a "menu" - just our wild bird field guild pamphlet - and you pretend, well, that you're in a restaurant and you order a bird to eat.  He LOVES Bird Restaurant.  Very into it especially if you order courses.  He's the waiter and the cook and the busboy and the other restaurant guests.  It's a good time.

In one of our games of Bird Restaurant, I told him about the time when I was pregnant with him and I looked out his window and saw a male Painted Bunting.  It was so shocking a bird I thought I was hallucinating.  I couldn't believe there was a bird in North America that looked like that.  "A Rainbow Bird", I told Ansel.  "A BIRD WITH RAINBOW COLORS?!" he practically screamed.  We looked at pictures together and now he asks me to tell him about the "rainbow bunting" and how they live in Savannah "where [he] was born."