Way Gone Bygones: About Ethan

Ethan turns five tomorrow, and Wednesday after I delivered him to his last day of preschool, I sat there and had a good cry. As he walked away from me to his classroom, his little swagger was such a mix of smart attitude, eagerness, and shy tenderness. That is the dichotomy that is Ethan. He is absolutely screaming and furious one moment, and laughing and hugging and telling you how much he loves you the next. He’ll stick his nose in the air with defiance when you ask him to do something, always pushing and pushing his boundaries. Then he runs to you and says, “I’m just kidding mommy!” with a burst of laughter and a quick squeeze. But between these vast swings of personality, we see a little boy who is delighted with life. He is so social, loves his friends and thinks just about anything is neat. No true absolute devotion for one topic, he has a fondness for super heroes, dinosaurs, reptiles, cars, robots, legos, video games, the outdoors and rainbows. The “real rainbows” with the color in the right order. He likes to joke and make people laugh, in a way already a bit of a class clown. Ethan is a similar to a puppy that climbs over and around his older brother Samuel and all his best friends.

If a child at the Rossi house picks a flower for mom, it is Ethan. Such as the piles of dandelions I collect each day. If a child encourages someone to keep going, what we might label perseverance, it is Ethan. We had a massive dogwood shurb die in the front yard and it was Ethan that told me to keep trying to get the root mass out and not just let daddy do it! And by golly, with a lot of sweat and struggle, the two of us managed to tear out that huge root ball! Even though I was ready to give up!

He already seems to have a head for numbers and announces them everywhere we go. “Dad, that bus has a nineteen on it!” and “Mom, five plus seven is twelve!” He’s starting to read and is very intuitive. When we did the “Elf on the Shelf,” he was our only child that said “Dad, that just a stuffed elf,” and “Mom, you moved it while we were sleeping because it is just stuffed and can’t move by itself.” It is so hard to get anything past him!

Ethan is our only child that was born with very much hair. It was dark and wavy and boy were we shocked when he turned out to be the blondest of them all! He’s a petite little thing with a flat rear end, so we have a hard time keeping his britches up. But what he doesn't have in the waist, he makes up for in feet because his tootsies are nearly as big as Samuel’s.

Without a doubt, Ethan is one mass of personality that we were blessed with for laughter, gentleness, a reminder to keep trying, and to test our boundaries and patience!! As we prepare for a celebration for his birthday tomorrow, I wanted to share one of my favorite pictures from each year of his life.

Ethan as a newborn - sleeping peacefully!