When Things Are Awesome

Have you ever had one of those days that is so stellar, so incredibly awesome, that it fills you with, well, awe?  The kind of day that leaves you feeling euphoric, and undeservedly lucky?  Those kind of days don't happen very often, which is probably a good thing.  It would be hard to appreciate them if they rolled around every week or so.  But there were two things that happened yesterday that made it just such a day in our house.

First off, yesterday, May 6, was guaranteed to be fabulous.  It was Thing 3's 10th birthday.  The best thing about your kids' birthdays is that it helps you to concentrate less on being in the trenches of parenthood, and more on the day that made you a parent in the first place.  For us, it brought back memories of that night in early May a decade ago, days from my due date, when I couldn't sleep and went down to the living room and watched a blizzard out my front window.  This was Calgary.  This was not surprising.  I had already planted petunias and the tulips were up.  It served me right.  Calgary gardeners should never be so cocky before the third week in May.

By the time Dan got up the next morning, the forecast was for a total of 40 cm of snow throughout the day.  He wisely decided to stay home from work, given my "condition".  Sure enough, at 5:00 pm, we headed for the hospital.  As you can imagine, it wasn't a fun trip.  The roads were terrible, and my mood was worse.

But at 7:16 pm, our littlest (biggest) was born.  And since that minute, he has been sharing his joy-filled laugh, his wicked sense of humour, and his uncannily good dance moves with us.  In short, we get to experience his awesomeness, every day.  For me, his birthday, as with his brothers', should be a celebration of how lucky we are to have him.

The second great thing that happened yesterday was The Second Thing.  Thing 2 has some special talents that cannot be denied, even modestly, by his mom.  He has a musical ear that, given his parents' musical ability, is truly baffling.  His "thing" is to listen to a song on YouTube or iTunes, and sit down at the piano and play it.  And I mean play.  He is fiercely understated about his own abilities, and is uncomfortable when complimented.  But on Thursday, he chose to be a contestant in the Middle School's talent show, mostly because we didn't tell him we thought he should enter.  He played his own arrangement of David Guetta's "Titanium".  Here is the video link to his performance:

Talent show performance

After the talent show judges deliberated over the weekend, he made the Final Three.  This meant that he had to perform one more time at school on Sunday morning, in front of the whole student body, along with the other two finalists.  His competition was solid:  an incredible sax player, and a brother and sister band whose power went out during their final performance, and yet somehow soldiered on flawlessly.  My kid had his work cut out for him.  The students and teachers now had to vote, and a winner would be determined by the end of the school day.

And then a funny thing happened.  He won.  He won the competition.  Which meant that a good chunk of the 450 kids in his school voted for his performance.  Which meant that not just his mom, or his dad, or his grandma, thought he was good.  Maybe it meant that others recognized a little bit of awesome in him, too.

Last night, we asked Thing 1 if anything exciting happened to him yesterday, and he said, with a laugh, yes—one of his brothers turned 10 and the other one won the talent show.  As I listened to the two younger boys chat during The Birthday Dinner (steak and Caesar salad, and birthday pie—what else?), I heard them talk about birthdays past and compliments given at school.  I realized that neither boy's special day was made less special because they had to share it.  In fact, it seemed to be twice as special.  Which made it wholly, irrefutably, awesome.