ready//not ready

Aidan has spent all last weekend away on another scout campout.  I spent all day Friday at WSU on a field trip picturing him fast forwarding through these next 7 years. 

I'm ready to enjoy him growing into his sense of humor.  I'm ready to see him facing challenges like never before, with a sense of maturity and a knowing that he is supposed to have some growing pains.  It kinda amazes me at the calm he has when he talks about his grades and his learning.  While I'm freaking out inside about perfection and future and seizing the day bullcrap, Aidan is saying things like, "it's ok.  I'm learning.  Every day I get more organized.  Everyone has to fall a little before they figure things out".  Yeah.  He really says those things.  Honestly, I thought he would be my anxious one.  And he is, about some things.  But he is calm about learning.  Even when Tony, God love him, is getting all nerdy math on him.  Please, please, please let him stay this way. Even when- especially when- he has to learn something that he can't quite see the value in. 

But I am so not ready to see him grown.  When it is just the three of us I can't shake a coldness, a quietness.  Nadia tries to fill the space and I am grateful for the time with her.  It is just not the same.  We like the normalness of the four of us, the balance of the four of us, the weight of each of us holding our place in this family. We joked about what it will be like when he goes off to school and we have a year with just her and we wondered if we could convince him to wait a year so we could rip the Band-Aid of their leaving off all at once. . .

And then our plan is to follow them around their college campus, park ourselves on their front steps and build ourselves little in law suites at their homes when they are all grown up.  That sounds completely normal and balanced, doesn't it?