16.3

I can't handle this.

This guy is sixteen years and three months old today. I don't usually notice the months when thinking about ages but, man. Of course, I've known it for a while. I think that it is just now hitting me that he is 6'3 and 243 lbs and not a kid anymore. 

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was holding him by his shirt tail in Disney World. In every single picture, my scrawny eleven year old arms are grasping his seven year old body in some way. I did the same thing with my older brother.  (I worried a little too much as a kid. Ha.)

I miss the days of singing "Going on a Bear Hunt" and some song about Pizza Hut and other fast-food chains that he taught me. I miss that day when we first heard him count to ten in a language that we had never heard of. I miss the day when we learned that he doesn't like when things have holes in them. I miss the day when he came to me with a broken sculpture in his hands and said, "It's okay. I'll fix it. Tape it." I miss the day when I was laying in bed and he brought me a huge bowl of cold spaghetti and said, "Mmm... smell. Smells good!" (His way of showing me that he had it/seeking my approval). I miss the Christmas when he started draping clean laundry on the Christmas tree while we were decorating it. I miss his routines. I miss the way that we squint and rub our noses against each others'. I miss him putting his hand on my forehead as if I am peering out into the distance. I miss that he won't remove his hand until I open my eyes widely. I miss the way he doesn't step over things, but instead walks around them or jumps over them. I miss when he would sit at the top of the stairs and ask me to sit at the bottom while we tossed toys back and forth until the day that we broke the light in the stairwell. (We stared at each other, gaping mouths... I cleaned up the glass and we kept playing.) I miss when he would sit in my bedroom floor while I sat on my bed and we would pelt each other with stuffed animals. Occasionally, I would refrain from throwing them until I had accumulated a large amount, and then throw them one by one but at machine gun-like speed. That made him laugh. I miss his chuckles and the way that he makes himself crack up and how you can hear it when you're on the other side of the house. I miss having his marble-rolling contraptions strewn throughout the floor. I miss his bright blue eyes and the way that he tucks his hand under his chin while he sleeps. Despite being on the more moderate to severe end of the autism spectrum, he is a typical sixteen year old. With sixteen comes mood swing and many other glorious things that I'm sure my parents are overjoyed to have in their houses again. His understanding for pulleys and levers is pretty impressive and he enjoys building ramps and slopes for marbles and cars. He can figure out how to do pretty much anything on a computer. He is very good at math. He can memorize movie scenes and scenes from shows very quickly. He loves Just Dance, Angry Birds, Mario, Zelda, Toy Story, hot air balloons, and when people laugh and sneeze. 

I'm going home this weekend and I can't wait to see him.  My parents want me to surprise him by being the one to pick him up from the YMCA and I can't wait to. When I do this, he turns to his friends and sort of pushes his bottom half back while leaning forward, and points to me in a silly way while smiling and lifting his eyebrows. Apparently, they've started doing some serious workouts at school because my dad said that his arms are very muscular. This means that that hug that he is going to give me... the already lung-bursting, bone-crushing hug is going to be ten times tighter and I'm okay with this. 

I couldn't be happier.

"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke."