As I was waking up this morning I heard Isaiah stirring a bit so I knew he was awake. A few minutes later I got up and went into his room. He was laying in bed but sat up with a smile and gave me a big hug when I sat by him on his bed.

"Good morning, Daddo."

"Good morning, Son. Happy Birthday!"

"Yeah, Happy birthday to y-..."

"Happy birthday to who?" I asked with a grin.

"Happy birthday to me," he replied "I got misunderstood there for a minute. I almost said happy birthday to you, but it's not your birthday. It's mine."

"That's right, it is your birthday, but nobody else is ready to get up yet so why don't you lie down for a little while longer till Mommy and I are ready to get up, OK?"

He laid back down and I went back to bed for a while till Gideon and Ruth woke up and got around to rising. When they did we all three went into Isaiah's room and sat on his bed.

"Gideon wanted to tell you happy birthday," Ruth announced.

"Why, thank you, Gideon," Isaiah said as he put his arms around his little brother.

"Happy birthday morning to my favorite five year old!" I exclaimed.

"Thanks, but I'm not five."

"Sure you are, it's your birthday- you're five today."

"Nope. I'm not five till I get a present."

I left his room and went next door to Gideon's room where Ruth had hidden the present I wanted to give Isaiah from me- a Lego mini robot kit that I knew he'd love. I brought it back in and handed the gift-bag (Ruth had put the box in a gift-bag covered with rocket ships and planets and covered the box with colored tissue for me the night before when I fell asleep before doing it) to him with a smile.

"Well, now you are five!"

Of course he opened it with glee and was on cloud nine until and after it was time to go to preschool.

This date also, coincidentally, was the night we were to have the big Denby (Ruth's side) family portrait taken at the mall since Uncle John had come in for a week's visit. It's Ruth's dad's birthday this week as well as Isaiah's and Ruth's mother and younger brother also have birthdays in March so John figured it would be a fine time to come and get all four birthdays out of the way and be here specifically for Isaiah's and his dad's.

There were ten of us altogether! Uncle John, Ruth and I, Gideon and Isaiah, Ruth's aunt and parents, and her younger brother and his wife. I think we challenged the photographer's composition skills, but she finally got everybody positioned. It still took a while to get done, though, because when you have ten people together it can be hard enough to get them to all smile and be motionless at the same time- especially when one is five, one is an infant, and more than half of them wear glassed which keep glaring in the flash.

We eventually got all the photographs of all the different groupings completed and then it was time to decide what prints we wanted. While they all huddled around the monitors to decide on how many wallets and how many five by tens they wanted, I watched Isaiah play with two little girls waiting to go in after us.

They were playing together at one of those play tables that has wooden beads that the kids can push along bendy-shaped wire loops. If you don't know what I mean, you'll probly see one the next time you're in a doctor's office or similar kind of waiting room and then you'll realize what I'm talking about.

Evidently one of the girls likes Power Rangers and she and Isaiah were pretending like the beads were something to do with them. I think Power Rangers are pretty feeble- no where near approaching the dramatic excellence of such televisual wonders of the past as Ultraman, or Giant Robot that I watched as a kid his age, but since I realize full-well, that I'd have to be an irrational dope to type this sentence with a straight face, I try to get over myself and let Isaiah enjoy his Power Rangers without hassling him about it too much.

At one point I heard him say "This yellow bead is a black hole."

"Wait a minute," I said "How can it be a black hole if it's yellow. Black holes are black- that's how they got the name."

"Well, this one's yellow."

"A yellow black hole?"

"Yup, a yellow black hole. In my world it's yellow."

"I see, so then you have your own private cosmology?" I asked wondering what he'd do with the word 'cosmology'.

"Sure, all the time." Then back to playing, "The black hole is coming closer! Watch out!" etc. as he played with the little plastic guy he brought along with him like it was a traveler in some sort of variant of the space-time continuum that could only be imagined by a five year old with a powerful mind and a love of all things science, space, or technology related. The little plastic guy, incidentally, is really part of the pit crew for a toy race car he has that you can switch the wheels, seats, and engine in and out of, but tonight he was surfing waves of aether in the limitless void.

After the pictures we went to Ruth's folks house for supper and to finish opening the first batch of presents Isaiah will be getting this week. This batch was only a foreshadowing of what's to come. His official family birthday party will be this Friday night at our house and he'll have his friends party at our house the next day. Tonight was kind of, well... Kind of his pre-birthday/real birthday observance.

Cause he's really five today and you can't turn five till you get presents.