I don't like those wires

In the last week or so, little E (the 4 year old, former micropreemie) has gotten really interested in looking at his baby photo album. The one that has the pics of him from birth until age 9 months or so. He wants to carry it around the house with him, and if I dare put it back on the shelf where it belongs, he gets it back down and asks for one of us to look at it with him.

It's amazing, isn't it, how the littlest of kids can sometimes say the biggest things? The things that just pierce your heart and throw you for a loop? Well, sometimes I think my boys are the champions at doing just that. When E first took out the photo album last week, and looked at those first few pictures of him in the first days of life, he asked me "what are all those wires, Mom?" Pang-in-the-heart #1. "Well, those were wires that connected you to machines that helped to take care of you after you were born." "You remember that you were a baby in the hospital?" (that's the phrase he and A use to describe preemies) "Yeah, I remember."

"Well, that means that you were sick when you were born, and needed the doctors and nurses to take care of you for a while." "What about that one?", motioning to the nasal cannula that gave him oxygen. "That helped you to breathe, it blew air into your nose so that you could breathe better."

Then he did it, the pang-in-the-heart to top them all: "I don't like those wires on me, Mom". Guess what, buddy? Neither do I. :( Oh how I wish that your newborn pictures, your first 3 months worth of pictures, didn't have "those wires" in them.

Every day since then, as he looks at those early pics, he'll say it again: "but I don't like those wires". Our saved pics on the computer come up now as the screen saver......it scrolls through a random assortment of pics until you tell it to stop, basically. Tonight, he said it again, while sitting in K's lap at the desk. "There's me when I was a baby, but I don't like those wires, Dad."

"I know, hon, I don't like them either."

:(