Happy Birthday, Big Joe

So 18 years ago today I was holding this brand new little fella right here.

He was a Saturday lunchtime baby and it snowed throughout my labor.  My sister was with me.  I asked her if it made her never want to have a baby.  She said it only made her want one more.

Even though he had a lateral lisp and basically no one could understand a word he said until he was about 5 years old, he had much to say and many tasks to accomplish.  He was the toddler voted hardest to watch. 

He would slip away in the blink of an eye, gravitated to coffee and adults and seemed to be a very impatient grown man trapped in an 18-month-old’s body.

A little mystery man?  Yeah.  And constantly dressing in who-knew-what-would-be-next.  We often wondered if he was secretly in the CIA because of his various clothing demands and his obvious agenda to do things his way.

After being such a hard-to-keep-up-with toddler, Big Joe only grew more and more pleasant to be around through the years.  Not that he wasn’t deliciously pleasant as a baby and toddler, it’s just that sometimes I felt my sciatic nerve was pinched completely in two from chasing him and retrieving him from dangerous places.

Dyslexia didn’t go over so well at the public school he was in, so in second grade he came home for school and we have never looked back.

Making pizza, probably rowing Little Nino’s Pizzeria, way back then.

This boy Joseph had a slew of pound puppies that had to travel with us everywhere we went.  Here we are — well here’s Papa Bear anyway, in a hotel room, his head and chest being overrun by pound puppies.  The pound puppies did have one kitten friend, but that’s just the way Joseph was.

Big Joe is the commander in chief standing on the building.  These boys were like little monkeys, swinging from tree to toy to tree with a dozen strategically placed ropes.  It wasn’t so many years after this that Joseph began to grow around his bigger brother, earning the name “Big Joe.”

I stayed up last night and made two homemade sour cream cheesecakes for Big Joe.  I wanted him to wake up this morning to his favorite “cake” in the world.  In fact, I wanted him to have cheesecake for breakfast if he wanted to, and that’s just what he did.

Big Joe today. 

18.

Happy 18th to a really, really, really good boy.