Adam just came up to me and said, “I’m so glad God gave me to you.”

Me too buddy, me too.

I’ve been seeing a lot of first day of school pictures lately of my friends’ children. Next year, Adam will be in that group and I am totally not prepared for that to happen. He’s getting so old and I just know, on his first day of kindergarten, I am going to be bawling (in the interest of full disclosure, I should let you know I am tearing up right now just thinking about it).

The other morning, Adam woke up and came to me so I could pick him up and snuggle with him for a few minutes. He told me, “In my dream, the circus was coming to town – to grandma and papa’s. And they brought a new big slide, a red one. They put more things on the swing set. We didn’t actually see them, but we had loads of fun. That’s all I remember.”

When Stacy was visiting last weekend, she and Adam had the following conversation:

Adam – Are you going to have a baby?

Stacy – I hope so, someday.

Adam – Will it be a girl baby or a boy baby?

Stacy – I don’t know.

Adam – Well, if you have a boy baby, you can trade us for our girl.

He also heard Stacy use the term “sneak attack” while she was here and has added it to his vocabulary. He combined it was the word “tackle” though, so it’s pretty common to hear things like, “Help! Luke’s attackling me!” around here.

One day last week Maggie and Luke were both upstairs, while Adam, Dave, and I were downstairs. Adam said, “Hey, this is just like the old days, before we had Luke and Mags.”

And one last Adam-ism, during the last thunderstorm Adam asked me if the noise he heard was thunder. I told him it was and asked him what he thought he was. He said, “I was thinking maybe Daddy and Luke were playing with cannons.”

The kids and I had a great day today.

I attempted to get a nice picture of the three of them to send to the teachers in my family to help brighten their first day back to school. Sherman didn’t really feel like cooperating (I wouldn’t expect anything less from him though).

I did get him to sit for a few seconds though.

I wrote the alphabet on the driveway and mixed the letters all up as I did it. I then called out letters and the boys ran to find them. I thought it would mainly be Adam finding them and Luke trailing along (Luke does know almost all of his letters, but Adam is quicker to identify them normally). It ended up being about fifty-fifty though, which of them would find the letter first. The best letters ended up being M and W – because they both could stand on one (depending which direction you looked at the letter).

Adam got to be very competitive about it and was pretty bummed that Luke found the letter Z first.

Luke didn’t understand why his brother wasn’t clapping with him. Adam told me he that he thought Luke won the whole alphabet. I promised him we’d do it again sometime.

After that game, Adam decided to write all the letters himself. Luke spent the time jumping from letter to letter and yelling them out as he landed.

That was until he found a bug to watch. He followed the bug across the driveway, and kept saying “hi” and waving to it.

Before we went inside Adam had me draw a crown and he colored it in. Then he laid down and I traced around him. He added the facial features and ears and told me it looks exactly like him.

Adam has had a security pillow for over two years now (I can even tell you the exact date, thanks to this website – it was April 1, 2011). He stole a pillow off of my bed while Dave was deployed and carried it around with him all the time. He named it “Pillow” original, I know. (I really shouldn’t talk though since I had a blue dog stuffed animal when I was little named “Blue Doggy” – we’re a creative bunch here.)

He actually had two pillows for a while, “Pillow” and “More Pillow”. They had the same pillow case, but were different pillows. Adam and my mom could always tell the difference, it took me a little while to figure it out though.

The pillow cases (or Pillow & More Pillow’s Shirts – as my dad named them) were very soft, but old. They couldn’t handle the repeated washing needed from being loved on by a toddler. I sewed them both several times before we decided to try to find a replacement shirt. We bought a set of green pillow cases that Adam loved in the store (green being his favorite “clulor” and all), but they weren’t soft enough out of the package.

Somewhere around this time Adam downsized from Pillow & More Pillow to just Pillow. He stole a soft enough shirt from another pillow in the house. And it wasn’t long after that, while taking a spin in a too hot dryer, Pillow earned the nickname, “Lumpy Bumpy”.

Last week, while driving home from my parents’ house, Adam got sick in the van – all over himself and Lumpy. Thankfully we had a diaper bag well stocked with plastic bags and baby wash and were able to clean up Adam and his carseat. Dave shoved Lumpy in a plastic bag and when we got home we decided it was time for a new pillow and Lumpy went out with the trash.

Adam and I checked every pillow in the house to see if any of them were close enough to be a suitable replacement. I even promised I’d give the new pillow the same too-hot dryer treatment to make it lumpy and bumpy. None of them were close enough and Adam went to bed that night with a not-quite-good-enough stand-in.

When I told my parents this my Dad launched a full scale rescue mission to save Lumpy Bumpy. I was bombarded with phone calls, text messages, and facebook posts. My parents, siblings, and sibling-in-laws all demanded we “Save Lumpy Bumpy”.

At midnight I started to feel really guilty about our decision to give up on Lumpy without a fight. It was this picture, taken the day before by my sister, that prompted me to convince Dave to go outside at 12:30 AM, in the rain, and rescue Lumpy from the curb.

Then I stayed up until 1:30 so I could set LBP up to soak in oxiclean overnight after his initial wash. I did another wash after that, just to remove any oxiclean residue and a fourth and final wash with some Downy Unstopables (they spell it that way, and yes it bugs me to have to type it that way) to make sure he smelled extra fresh.

Adam’s first words to me the next morning (while Lumpy was in the midst of his third wash) were, “I couldn’t sleep last night without Lumpy”. I didn’t tell him that we were trying to save Lumpy – just in case it didn’t work.

He was playing with legos in his room when I got Lumpy and his shirt out of the dryer. The pillow actually smells really, really good. I have to hand it to those Unstopables (even misspelled), they did a great job. I put Lumpy on the couch and called Adam in to the living room. At first he thought it was just a different pillow wearing Lumpy’s shirt. He was very happy when he realized it was the original Pillow/Lumpy.

And I am very happy that my family convinced me to save Lumpy from the landfill. It was definitely the right choice.

(Completely off topic, but do you see those curls in that first picture?!? Why did I ever cut Adam’s hair?)