Everything changes

In the foreground here we have Jake, my eldest, Charlie used to love Jake, he came everywhere with us. He was dragged through many sandpits, up and down a hundred slides and swung from the side of a buggy for ever. Jake went missing several times, sometimes accidently which bought about frenzied searching and panic until he was found and sometimes not quite so accidently when he went for a spin in the washing machine which bought about trips to the ice-cream van and various distractions until he was dry again.
Charlie started to grow up and Jake made less and less appearances until one day Jake went under the bed and Charlie didn't really miss him. He had a new passion in his life, he had dinosaurs.
Facts about which era a T-rex lived would be randomly thrown at me during dinner, the hallway became a dangerous place to walk in the dark for fear of being impaled by a plastic Triceratops and the book shelf rapidly filled with dinosaur fact books. When cleaning his room one time I noticed a new addition to the shelf, in amongst the dinosaurs was a small lego model.
For his next birthday Charlie asked for another lego set, then followed another. Soon every shelf had a model of a Star fighter or a war base and the dinosaurs moved lower, I wouldn't see him for hours as he sat and poured over instruction manuals and painstakingly put togther tiny piece after tiny piece he worked in silence and I would watch the concentraton on his face. Gradually the silence would be replaced with a small burst of music as the ipod moved in and then the lego building stopped and he requested an itunes voucher. Now I still don't see him but I hear him jumping around upstairs as the music gets louder and it's only a matter of time before I have to yell to turn it down and ask if he is going to grace us with his prescence for dinner, it hasn't happened yet but it will.
Everything changes, and I am so proud of watching the young man he is becoming in front of my eyes, but sometimes I miss Jake xx