“Did you hear that, S?” I asked.
I was in the process of preparing breakfast when I heard the click of the door handle opening. The dishwasher had been emptied, the French toast was heating up in the microwave and the eggs were scrambling in the frying pan. I heard a couple of soft steps on the hardwood floor, followed by a pause and the toilet flushing. I heard the rush of water from the bathroom faucet and then he appeared in the kitchen.
“Oh, E awake!” S exclaimed happily from the counter behind me. “Hi E!”
I looked up from the eggs at the boy standing in front of me. He looked… older, somehow. He still looked the part of a six-year-old but there seemed to be a change in the way he was carrying himself. He looked taller than he had the day before and his face seemed to have aged overnight. His tousled hair still hinted slightly at kindergarten but his posture and his suddenly broad shoulders spoke clearly of first grade.
He smiled at his younger sister, returned the greeting and yawned.
“Good morning,” I said as I quickly poured drinks for the three of us. “How does it feel to be done with kindergarten?”
“Good,” he answered with a proud grin. “Camp starts today, right?”
“Yup,” I said. I transferred the food to the plates, lowered S to the floor and led the children to the dining room table to eat. I made sure the kids were set with their plates, doled out the whipped cream, syrup and vitamins – in that order, of course – and finally sat down myself. “Are you excited?”
E smiled, his teeth already full of chocolate chips from T’s challah. He nodded vigorously.
We began discussing the various aspects of camp which E was anticipating. We worked around respective mouthfuls to note the improvements we had seen on the grounds at the orientation a few days earlier and which activities seemed the most thrilling. E named a few friends that he was looking forward to seeing and we reviewed the names of his counselors. I couldn’t help but smile at the matter-of-fact nature of E’s comments, the confidence in his tone. He was not even twenty-four hours removed from his last few minutes of kindergarten but school was in the rear view mirror and fading fast.
E got dressed while I cleared the table and asked to open the workbooks that T had bought him so that he could keep his mind sharp during the summer. I tried – largely unsuccessfully – to hide the surprise in my voice and told him it was fine. He lay down with the book on the couch and began writing, pausing occasionally to ask a question or to show off his progress.
I returned to the kitchen to finish the rest of my morning chores. My hands worked on autopilot; making a sandwich, filling water bottles, preparing T’s breakfast and gathering snacks for S for the day. I was bewildered by E’s sudden maturity, his abrupt jump from little kid to just “kid.” The rational part of my brain knew that he was still young, that he was still a child, that he was still “mine,” to whatever extent he ever had been. The emotional part, though, was already picturing his high school graduation, buying him his first real suit for job interviews and packing up the car to bring him to college.
I blinked a few times and tried to remember the other tasks that needed to be completed for camp, as opposed to school, and it came back to me in a flash. I did a quick Google image search on my phone, took the Sharpies out of the drawer, grabbed a piece of paper from the pad on the refrigerator and started drawing. I scribbled his name quickly next to the picture and taped the paper to his water bottle. I brought the bottle out to the living room and held it out to E.
“What do you think?” I asked.
E looked up from the workbook. His eyes lit up with recognition and his lips stretched into a wide smile. He jumped up from the couch, took the bottle and laughed.
“Oh, I forgot you used to do these drawings for me last year!” he exclaimed. “Thanks!”
I smiled also as he ran to show my handiwork to T. Time wasn’t rushing by quite as quickly as it had felt a few minutes earlier. The car for college unpacked itself and my six-year-old going on sixteen returned to just being six again. He was still mine, if just for a little while longer.
