I'm not exactly sure how long the Christmas lights have been hanging around my son's door. Since he got his own room after his brother was born in March of 2007, I have to assume that they have been hanging there since sometime around Christmas of that year. Aside from a couple of times when we moved burned out light bulbs around, the lights haven't been turned off or unplugged for over eight years.
Every day I would walk by his room and get a little smile on my face as it brought me back to that sweet little boy that moved into his "Mickey Mouse" room. He was so into music that I painted piano keys on the wall. He was into Buzz Lightyear, Star Wars, Cars, and all the typical things a three year old boy would love.
His likes have changed through the years. He's not so much into Disney things anymore (though he loves GOING TO Disney), music isn't his passion, Star Wars is still cool, but not in the "I want to be Anakin Skywalker" type of way. All of that has been replaced by baseball. Some of the old stuff still remains, but only because we are too lazy to go about remodeling his bedroom. He could probably use a new bed. The one he is in now is made with crappy particle board and one of the drawers underneath his bed fell apart a couple of years ago. There is a chair in there that has never been used and books pile up with no place to go.
While he has changed and some of the room has changed, the lights on the outside remained constant.
Eight years they have brought me back to the past. A time that as I get older, I long for more and more. I was just thinking this morning that my younger son no longer runs into my bedroom in the middle of the night. He used to wake up and go to the bathroom and then jump right beside me. It sucked at the time, but it sucks now that it doesn't happen anymore.
Half of the lights around my son's door shut off the other day.
Normally I would have gone in and tried to fix them. Just like replacing batteries in toys that they no longer use, I realized that perhaps it's time to move on. As much as I would like my kids to stay young forever, it's not going to happen. I can't fix that. Who knows, maybe we will hang a new set of lights around his door, but the glow will never be the same.
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