Happy 5th Birthday, Gedalya! :D

Look at my big boy!

He's even bigger now than in these photos, because in these photos he's only 4 1/2...

These photos from four months ago are the most recent ones I have uploaded. 

I connected the external drive with the photos on it in this five-year-old's honor! It's a bit of a process... the drive I had ran out of space, and I ordered two larger drives. One to keep the photos on and one for backup. So far, I transferred most of the existing photos to the new drive. But I didn't upload photos from my camera since December! Because of that, I haven't taken as many photos as usual, either. One reason was memory card space, and another was the sheer volume of photos that I'd need to plow through when I finally transferred months of photos. In fact, I just charged my camera's batteries for the first time since our move a month and a half ago!

Right before Pesach doesn't seem like an opportune time for messing with files and drives, but how can I have a birthday tribute without featuring the big boy himself?? So enough about my technology mess...

Say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the best five year old boy!

Gedalya is a unique combination of energy, wildness, compassion, softness and intelligence.
If I had to use just one description of him, it would be daring and vivacious. But he doesn't fall into that stereotype at all.
This child loves living things. Animals, insects, plants... and he is very observant when it comes to nature. He will find any little shell, unusual leaf, shiny rock, new bud on a bush...
On our block there are two houses which attract Gedalya like a magnet. One has tulips in the garden and another has a whole troop of dandelions growing in front of it.
Every time we go out, Gedalya counts the dandelions. He is so pleased that there are new ones growing every day! In the beginning there were around thirty, and day by day they multiplied and now, much to my little big boy's delight, there are well over 100. And the tulips, too. He was waiting so eagerly for them to open, and he cheered on any little progress he saw.
Gedalya stops to smell the flowers, and not in a figurative way. Every time we pass a garden with flowers, he stops to smell them, And if it's a new type of flower that he hasn't smelled before, all the better! (I let him smell the new ones even when we are in a rush. :))

But as gentle as Gedalya seems in the paragraphs above, he is one rough and tumble boyish boy! He can be seen hanging upside down from the top bunk, and jumping from Mama's to Tatte's bed and back again.
He doesn't walk. He gets around by running, skipping or jumping. He is the fastest runner in the family! And there is nothing even remotely climbable that Gedalya wouldn't climb.

And his reading... oh, his reading. This child can pull any book off the shelf and read it, providing he is familiar with the words. And even if he doesn't know a word, he is able to read it, as long as he has seen it previously.
Even atypically spelled words, like "special." Once he read "mission," which surprised me because he doesn't know it, and the spelling isn't phonetic. But I guess he has seen it and heard it read before, so it stuck in his (I'm beginning to suspect photographic) memory.

He is our birthday boy, and we all love him!

 HAPPY FIFTH BIRTHDAY, DEAR GEDALYA!

High five!