68 Months

At school they call Lucas, "The Little French Boy".

As the school year slowly comes to an end...and I mean slowly because I never imagined when we began this great journey ten months ago that I would be praying for it to end, whereas we thought that it would give us a break from our energetic five-year-old boy but then it only turned out to give our schedules an extra item to attend to, forcing us to longingly dream of the early bus that arrives in the morning carting off all the kids to school and dropping them off late in the afternoon, so that we are now constantly teasing and bribing Lucas with hopes that he will be ready to hop on that bus come September...Lucas has fully embraced his French studies.

There are many days and so many ways that makes both Xtimu and I truly appreciate that little boy of ours. He's a genius at grocking the wonders of the world around him. He's completely adaptable, conscientious, aware and he continues to tweak us toward various and new perspectives that only a child can provide. I'm pretty certain that, if we continue to harness and focus our energies into a cohesive and knowledgeable tool of parenting know-how, Lucas will accomplish anything that he puts his mind toward.

I will say that I have also noticed how drastically our son is changing; into a mature little boy, into a sophisticated communicator, into an individual, into a multi-lingual achiever. He definitely is no longer that little doe-eyed beautiful baby boy that blew our world askew. So many times I find, when I am talking to him or simply just watching him, that I can see this grown up person before me. It's like I fast-forward ten years and my mind blurs into a crash-twilight-zone moment. I go a little numb, but I can't help but smile because I imagine that Lucas at fifteen is going to be wonderful just like he is at five.

Yeah, he still has some issues (we all have our karma don't we?) but I'd rather focus on the tremendous abilities that he is fortunately endowed with, like speaking French. His wonderful teacher has told us numerous times over the past couple of weeks about Lucas's little nickname because he always speaks French in class. He responds to her questions in French. He asks his own in French. He even mumbles in French when he's doing his homework, which is absolutely adorable, by the way.

Ever since the school year began, we've conspired to take advantage of this new gift of language that our son is accumulating. We joked that we would most certainly have to take a trip to the western shores of Europe and use our faithful son as interpreter. We thought that we could probably head over sometime in his early teens, maybe when he graduates from middle school. Well, we better watch out because it isn't a joke anymore and we may be headed across that great big ocean in just a few years from now.