Carsten turned 11 yesterday.

If you know Carsten personally, you know that he is all about the food. So, to celebrate, we had pancakes and bacon for breakfast, and pasta with Italian sausage and Texas Toast for dinner. And, we had that root beer cake I mentioned.

It’s so cliché to say so, but really, I can’t believe he’s eleven. To say it aloud, the words don’t seem to fit right on my tongue, as if I must be talking about someone else’s kid, certainly not my own. And before those words he’s eleven slip out, I have to do a quick mental fact check to verify that it is true.

Eleven is middle school and friends and Modern Warfare and learning to play the cello. It is a fascination, nay, an obsession, with scary movies, and eating your weight in pepperoni pizza and Texas Toast. Eleven is “Would you like me to start the car and get it warmed up for you, Mom?” which is code for “I’m going to get the radio tuned to the exact station – and volume – that I most like.”

Eleven is in between: it is old enough to no longer want to be kissed on the lips, but young enough to still want to be read to and tucked in at night. It is old enough to have a definite opinion on music and fashion and brand names, yet young enough to still need to be reminded that five fingers are not an adequate substitute for a hairbrush, and that the whole point of a shower, is to use the soap.

Eleven is a funny, new language: Dude, that is so beast! (Repeat, eleventy-thousand times with your friends.) Eleven is old, but not so old that potty humor is no longer funny. In fact, it’s still pretty beast. Eleven is wanting to talk to your friends, in private. 

Eleven is a favorite song called “I’m sexy and I know it,” by a band called LMFAO. This, makes me miss the days when Jim Gill was all the rage.

Eleven. How old that sounds! Closer to learning to drive, than to learning how to ride a bike.

Eleven used to seem so distant, a tiny little speck on the far-away horizon, the distance from here to there about as far as from here to the moon. Eleven was other people’s kids, not mine. Then one day I blinked, and when I looked again, there it was. I found that the moon had risen, big and full and bright, right in my own back yard.

Eleven. How did that happen? I don’t really know, but it’s kinda beast.

 

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