(From April…) This marvelous boy is TWO today! Happy birthday to the sweetest, most determined, most captivating baby boy I’ve ever known.

Watching Gussy make his own path through the developmental milestones has been a privilege I could never have imagined. I knew that he would do things in his own time, but I had no idea how many baby steps we would find to celebrate along the way.

*** Hi there! This is August Jodi finally circling back to a blog post that I started nearly four months ago. We’ve had five more birthdays since Gus’s, so I may never catch up, but one has to start somewhere! I’m going to *try* to stick with the pictures I had chosen in April when I started this post, but I’ll throw in a current one at the end. ***

I don’t know why I had his second birthday in mind as a sort of deadline for Gus to walk. It just seemed like he was so close for so long, and I was sure he would make it. When our children’s ministry leader asked me months before his birthday whether I wanted to move him up to the toddler room on his birthday or let him hang out in the baby nursery a little longer, I had confidently told her, “Oh, he’ll be walking by two!”

But the Lord (and Gus) were kind to me: on the day before he turned two, Gus took his first undeniable independent steps. From there, a step or two were a rare event for a number of weeks. Then he was taking seven… eight… ten… twelve steps in a row. But it was still just a party trick, and when he finished he would plop down and give himself a clap. Then about three weeks ago, just after Trevor and a few of the kids left for a trip to England, it all clicked! He now walks around the house like a little boss, pivoting, bending down to pick things up, stopping to pet the pets and then walking on some more. There’s no stopping him!

Developmentally, this tiny boy is doing all the things. He had a reevaluation for Early Intervention Services about six weeks after his birthday. The only area in which he would even qualify for services (apart from his diagnosis, which automatically qualifies him) was expressive language. While he does have a few spoken words, he has a large and ever-growing vocabulary of signs. I think we guessed around thirty at the time of the evaluation. If those words could have counted, he would have been in the “normal” range there as well. But his play skills and attention span are age-appropriate. His adaptive skills (I call this area “knowing what things are for”) are impressive! If you give him a brush, he brushes his hair. Give him a shoe: he tries to put it on. When he grabs my cell phone (and he’s quick!), he holds it up to his ear or takes a selfie with it. He knows what everything is for! He is the most engaged, perceptive little person I’ve ever known.

I don’t like to perpetuate stereotypes. Of course people with Down syndrome experience the full range of human emotions just like anyone else. But this boy is always happy. Really. Like, unless we directly offend him in some way and that little bottom lip goes out for a minute, he is just the happiest, most easy-going baby I’ve ever known (and I’ve known some happy babies!) He is pure joy, and the whole family just basks in his sunshine.

I sometimes look back on the different stages of learning who Gus was going to be: the moment when I was sitting on the edge of my sofa 28 weeks pregnant and the midwife told me that the test came back positive, the moment when I first laid eyes on him and knew immediately that the test was right… I thought that I had true peace in those moments, that it really was well with my soul. But now? Now that I know him? It’s so much more than that. He’s just better than I ever could have imagined.

I wondered then what others would think about him, about me. That I had “pushed my luck” to have a baby so late in life? That “that’s what happens”? I feel now, deep in my bones, that this perfect boy was a gift to me directly from the hand of God. The kind of gift that I am excited to open again and again every day when I wake up. The kind of gift that makes everything different and magical. My long-awaited Gus… how could he ever have been anyone else?

Happy very belated birthday, sweet boy!