While I am no expert like my sweet friend Kimberly, the blessed mama to SIX lovely boys, I am learning.  A lot.  Having grown up with only sisters, the world of legos, star wars and weapons was entirely foreign to me.  Now that boys win around here (for the moment at least) with Phineas’ birth tipping to scale to boys-by-one, I’m trekking along on my journey of learning to love and nurture these little men the best I can.

There are some, like writer Sally Clarkson (whose two-part guest post on the MOB blog was excellent), far more seasoned in the raising of boys, I’m still a well-intentioned newbie.  Many a day I can be heard saying “how do you do that? why did you do that? that is NOT a weapon!”.    The way their little minds work is a mystery often.  They have energy and a zeal for rocks, dirt, things with wheels, tools and all things battle-related that blows me away sometimes.  How they could cultivate all that boyness in a sit down, school-room-all-day setting is beyond me.

I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity to learn at home and lend them the freedom to spend hours taking apart home appliances with their ‘man box’ tools and to craft all sorts of things out of cardboard boxes and duct tape.  The freedom to whoop and holler and wrestle and be all the boy they are.  The simple gift of time to spend in wonder at the black beetle in the yard and how it always seems to turns itself right side up.  The chance to share a newly acquired skill with a younger sibling.

But I’m getting sidetracked.  My point today was simply the beauty of learning to embrace little boys for all the wonder they were created to be.  So that when you sit down to the lunch table, finally able to eat, and look to your left to see this:

And you hear him say with glee “It’s not a sandwich, its a TANK!” as he stuffs cherry stems into his grilled cheese sandwich in complete delight so much so that he inspires his older brother to do the same so they can have grilled-cheese-cherry-stem battles right there at the lunch table.

And I’ve walked this road enough to know that some days, I absolutely have to smile and giggle and tell them their ‘tanks’ look awesome and what a fabulous idea that is.  We can let the ‘don’t play with your food’ lecture wait for another day.  I’m pretty sure we’ll all survive (grin).