Happy Birthday Nathan

By the time this cute little guy was born we had our name formula figured out: first name-from the scriptures, middle name-from the family.  Nathan was a prophet in the Old Testament, not a a super well-known figure but what a great name, right?  His middle name was Robert after my father and his great grandfather on Paul's side. 

When Nathan was two he taught me that learning games are fun.  I went into the bathroom and found him drawing with a toothbrush on the mirror.  He smiled at me and said, "I'm drawing an "M", see?  Now you go out and I'll draw and that will be real fun."  He still thinks learning is fun.

Living with little Nathan I realized that angels are protecting the children.  He ran everywhere and it seemed that he fell between things a lot more than he fell against them. Once we were at the zoo in NE (think craziest weather in the world) when a little whirlwind came gusting by.  A limb came tumbling off a tree down onto my baby.  There he stood right in-between branches that had fallen on either side of him.  He looked at me with concern and asked, "Who threw that stick at me?"

Nathan always had a hero so I learned to be careful with the heroes I presented my children through media, etc.  When he was about 4 he told his Sunday School teacher, "Nathan is my real name, but Luke is my cool name.  He pretended to be Superman, Kale from Willow (totally against the family rules because Kale was a bad guy), Ghostbusters and those guys from the 3 sports hero cartoon.  What was the name of that show?  Nathan and Aaron spent hours with paper bringing heroship to life.

Nathan made a ghost trap with paper.  It had a pedal that he would step on when they were in ghost trouble. Then Aaron would slip over to the closed trap in ghost-busterly fashion and manually open the trap so it could suck the ghost in.

They made paper hockey pucks for their sports hero TV show games.  Wayne Gretzky was one of the characters. There were a wide variety of pucks, but I was always a little confused with the benefits of the cheese hockey puck.  Insights anyone?  So basically the lesson is that you can make anything with a little paper and scotch tape.  I do remember a friend coming into my living room and proclaiming, "Wow.  I would never let my kids do this."  I'm not sure that was a compliment.

This is not a true representation of the typical white storm of paper that inhabited my living room when  there was construction afoot.

One more thing we learn from Nathan is that Pound Puppies are awesome.  If you could see the happiness on his face after a pound puppy purchase, you also would take him to the store a million times.

As Nathan grew older he didn't get in trouble very often, but when he did he said, "OK, I'll fix it."  Isn't it great to know things can be fixed?  We can change.  We don't have to repeat our mistakes.  We can apologize.  I had a decorative door harp that he wanted to play for real.  Unfortunately he broke one of the strings, but he told me, "It's okay. I fixed it."  I looked and saw his sweet little-boy fix-it job with scotch tape, (what else?) and my heart melted.  I left the tape on for a long time so I could remember, "It's OK.  We can fix it.

Happy Birthday Nathan Robert (Luke) Stoker.  Thanks for being great.