Levi

Since today is Levi’s birthday, I couldn’t help but reminisce of the exciting adventure he is to our family.

He was born eleven years ago. He’s since kept up with life by taking it fast and furious. It took him years to learn how to walk. His first three steps were a breath-taking run, and he’s been running ever since.

He’s so notorious for tripping and falling, it’s not even funny. A crash is a normal sound around here. The fearful look from the faint-at-heart not accustomed to hearing such things, is assured with the fact that all is well, "It just sounds like Levi."

There was that time Mom and Dad thought it would be lovely to have a picture of the kids to give to the grandparents. So they arranged us up on one of the many flights of stairs in our split-level house. Of course six young kids are not always photogenic, especially if there’s one who’s accident-prone. Just as the camera shutter flashes there’s a Levi-gasp. He managed to lurch from his little perch at the top of the stairs (who in the world stuck him up there anyway?) and took his accidental flight clear down to the bottom, landing with a Levi-crash. Of course that picture never quite made it to a 5x7.

While printing out wedding invitations for Toby and Courtney, I made the mistake of allowing Levi to do his schoolwork at the same table. Don’t ask me how the pencil got from Levi’s notebook to the internal revenues of Toby’s printer, but it did. The computer shrieked and the sound of printing gears jamming put my work on hold. Being in a time-crunch I had no other choice but to pick up the phone and call my brother in-law-to-be who happened to be out on a date with his fiancée. He tried to talk me through the steps of righting the situation, but the invitations from then on had faint lines on them.

Then there’s the time that in a game of tag out in the woods, Levi crashed headlong into a tree. He bravely bore the bruises, abrasions, cuts and teasing about tree-hugging for weeks. When it was finally healed, he managed to be playing the same game in the same woods and found himself head-to-trunk with the same tree, bearing the same inevitable consequences for weeks yet again.

But that’s our Levi… And the way we like him. I hope you have a safe and happy 11th birthday, Levi!