A/N: Please note that the chapters will be going up on Fridays for 2022.

Chapter 138
Family Anniversary

For the two of the past three years, Maya had either been near-to-bursting pregnant or recently delivered of a baby on this day. Then last year, she'd been backed by their two 'currently one-year-old' sons to ring in this birthday of his. This year, they had one boy nearly three, one freshly two, and one sitting cozy about halfway through gestation. It was something of an inconvenience to mobility for Maya, but she supposed she'd had worse, right? Anyway, she had helpers.

"Okay, okay, easy now…" Maya whispered to herself as she moved to extricate herself from spoon hold without waking her birthday man. There were always plenty of chances that she'd accidentally wake him as she got up, to go to the bathroom or to answer a summons from across the hall, but she'd just tell him to go back to sleep and he'd… well, he'd listen half of the time. This was different, this was his birthday, and the whole idea was to surprise him, so covertness was key.

She nearly made it, too, and then she felt his hand at her lower back and turned her head to find his eyes open and looking back at her.

"Hey, go back to sleep, come on," she carefully turned herself sideways so she could reach out and brush at his hair. "Close your eyes." He made a noise. Nuh-uh. "I already have two toddlers, you're a grown man," she teased.

"But it's my birthday," he 'complained.'

"Yeah, so let me do my thing," she whispered with a wide grin.

"What thing is that?" he asked, looking so amused with himself at not letting her go and keeping her near instead.

"You won't find out if you don't go back to sleep," she stood without resistance. He watched her and turned to continue watching her as she walked around the bed. "Trying to lure me with those eyes, are you?"

"What, I can't help it with you looking like that," he smiled.

"Oh, yes, yes, of course," she nodded confidently, giving him a slow turn. "Is that going to hold you over?" she asked.

"Mm, what's that? I didn't…" he motioned to his face as he gave an exaggerated yawn in a display of how he was duly going to sleep. Maya snickered.

"You're getting so weird in your old age."

"Hey!" he 'complained.'

"Sleep, old man."

"Yes, ma'am."

Now that the boys were getting very good at opening doors on their own, it felt like an invitation to mischief and a bit of chaos. There was nothing to be done for it except to try and impress upon both Elliott and Noah the… etiquette of closed doors. It had turned into a whole thing in the last couple of weeks, a game with some inherent cuteness. Many times, they would hear a light rapping at their door followed by a call of 'hello, Mommy?' or 'Daddy, you there?' or the ever popular 'Mommy gotta go' and 'Oops, Daddy.'

As he went about 'sleeping' again, Lucas could hear Maya across the hall, and the boys, too. Of course, they'd been awake. What they'd been doing as they waited was entirely up to their imagination, though from having listened at the door and then opened it to look inside many a time over, they had a good idea. They would look in on them if they ever got up in the middle of the night, and they'd be in their own beds, curled up under their knitted blankets with their preferred sleep companion of the moment, whether it was Opie Bunny, Tum-Tum Teddy, Otto the Octopus, or Chewbacca.

But most mornings they would be found lying or sitting next to one another on one bed or the other, suggesting that upon waking either Noah would go and join his big brother or Elliott would do the same for his little brother. They would exchange words as they had the means to do so, and their conversations as overheard would be both funny and sometimes nonsensical, but always they impressed upon their parents how inseparable they were, had always been, and would hopefully forever be.

Lucas started to wonder what was going on in the other room. He was hearing strange noises mixed in with the boys' giggles and squeals. Every once in a while, one of them would call out a color. Then, after something like fifteen minutes, Elliott came to stand in the hall and stare over at him where he lay. Noah was right on his heels.

"Daddy, don't look!" Noah pointed his finger at him.

"Go to sleep, Daddy!" Elliott instructed him.

"You are so much like your mother," he resisted the urge to laugh as he went ahead and turned around, the better to face away from the door.

"Are you sleeping now?" Elliott called out. Lucas debated what the right answer here would be, which was a very hard call to make when the judge was just shy of three years old. If he said nothing and pretended to sleep, Elliott might just ask again, but also if he said that yes, he was sleeping, then his son could argue that this wasn't true, because he was talking. He decided to cut down the middle by feigning some slightly exaggerated snores. It made Noah laugh, which almost made Lucas blow his cover. "Mommy, he's sleeping now!" Elliott called to his mother.

"Oh, good for him!" Lucas heard Maya reply, loud enough to suggest her words were specifically for him.

It took five more minutes before he heard anything to suggest they were coming. He knew his part and he played it well as he went on pretending to sleep and tossed out the occasional snore for good measure. He still had difficulty placing the sounds he heard, amid the quiet laughter of his sons. He felt the mattress move under the new weight of what he guessed to be one of the boys, and then the other, and then Maya as well. Finally, with no concern for his much requested 'sleep,' he was invited to wake again by the mess of a triple 'happy birthday!'

When he opened his eyes, he was momentarily disoriented by the appearance of many colors all around him, and he finally understood what the noises had been. Balloons. They were everywhere, all around him, all around his wife and sons on the bed, in a multitude of colors and all bearing the number 25 printed over them.

Satisfied with the look of genuine surprise on his face, Elliott and Noah immediately went and tackled their father, piling on with renewed wishes for a happy birthday. Lucas caught them as swiftly as he could, though he did have to do his very best to stifle a groan when some little knees or elbows connected with unsuspecting limbs on the way. He would happily bear it all when the trade-off involved a group hug with two of his three favorite boys…

"Did you blow all of these up?" he asked them, making the face of someone strenuously attempting to fill a balloon with air. It was a big hit for the three and under crowd and didn't do so bad with the twenty-something either.

"Mommy did it," Noah informed him.

"With the pull stick," Elliot mimed.

"Well, we weren't the best crowd for lung capacity these days," Maya reasoned her use of the air pump.

They had good couple minutes wherein the boys had a great time of tossing the colorful globes around, squealing as they'd fall back over them, after which their father introduced them to the 'magic' of static electricity and instantly blew their little toddler minds. By the time Pappy Joe appeared in the door, commenting on the room giving him decades old flashbacks, he quickly found himself chased by his disheveled great grandsons, each with a balloon in hand and ready to see what they would do to his salt and pepper hair.

"Let's just move a couple of these… right here… and here we go," Maya breathed after having nudged aside the balloons which had yet to fall to the ground so she could go and stretch out on her side of the bed and set her head at her husband's waiting shoulder. "Not a bad wake-up, huh?" she asked as she smiled up to him.

"Oh, well, you know, I was dead asleep there, and the next thing I knew…" Lucas recalled, failing just a bit miserably at hiding his smile.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Maya shook her head as she stretched up to kiss him. She was received warmly, with Lucas closing his arms around her to keep her near for as long as this moment would last. Today, it lasted a few minutes before the distinctive sound of dogs coming nearer to their room forced them to rise. Dogs and balloon were not going to mix well.

"Two down, one to go, huh?" Lucas told Maya once they'd prevented this one wave of chaos.

"Oh, no, no, the day's just starting. We're focusing on you today, okay? Elliott will get his turn before we know it, but today is Lucas day. I love that day, it gave me you," Maya proudly reminded him.

She was not wrong, on both parts. Sure, they'd already celebrated over the weekend, same as Noah three weeks back, and they had schoolwork to tackle, but Maya made absolutely certain to make the most of the day and make Lucas feel that it was indeed his day.

And when that day was behind them, then they could turn their attention to the last of their May boys. In no time at all, their eldest, their firstborn son, would be three years old. They could see by now how it would never stop amazing them to realize their children were a year older already, but when it was Elliott, it did feel different, didn't it? They would always look at him and see that tiny thing they'd placed in Maya's arms, after he was born, making parents of Lucas and her both. He could be three, or five, or ten, twenty, fifty, eighty… and they would never forget when he'd been less than a minute old.

Elliott Lucas Friar began his first day as a three-year-old by accidentally pinching his fingers when he went to open his bedroom door. He screeched in alarm, naturally, which summoned his parents with haste, the better to tend to that small hand and calm him down, even as his little brother hovered around and asked if he was okay. By the time Maya and Lucas – and Pappy Joe – were all satisfied that nothing was broken, and that the pain would soon go away, the best remedy became for Elliott to lie in his mother's arms, back in the big bed. Maya would gently rub his back and sing to him, and his sniffles would recede, one thousandth of an inch at a time.

Lucas' contribution to soothing his eldest son's nerves was to fix up their breakfast and bring it to be enjoyed picnic style up in the attic. Noah was recruited to help in this, along with his father and great grandfather. As much as he clearly wanted to stay with his brother, it felt like Elliott would benefit most of all from a quiet pause with their mother.

As she held him, Maya felt very much caught up in a wave of time. Her baby boy was three years old. He was still so small, so easy to fit in her arms, but now it felt as though they were nearing a precipice, and he would just keep getting bigger and bigger and then he wouldn't be small at all. He wouldn't fit in her arms this way anymore. Now it felt as though she wasn't just holding him to comfort him anymore. She was holding him to just commit all of this moment to memory. The small stature of her sprout of a boy… His little head resting against her… Short legs, little feet, tiny toes… Short arms, little hands, tiny fingers… He had the one hand he'd hurt kept close to himself but the other found its way against his mother's belly, to where his baby brother was growing. He just tip-tapped his fingers there, quietly, peacefully, and Maya didn't disturb him. She just pressed a silent kiss to the top of his head and went on holding him, her big small boy.

Down below, with Noah perched on his step next between him and Pappy Joe, Lucas worked to scramble some eggs enough for the five of them. Very carefully, he would allow the two-year-old to push at the eggs with the wooden spoon from time to time. He took every task given to him with the greatest drive, as though he had been entrusted with something so important that he had to make sure he did it the right way. This wasn't always a success, but he was never discouraged from trying. He dropped the little green onions into the eggs when it was time, then helped to scramble them, too. And on the other side, he would help Pappy Joe put other things like fruit and toast into the plates.

"Alright, let's start and get some of these things upstairs," Lucas turned off the stove and turned to his young son. "You want to come with me?"

"Yeah!" Noah answered at once.

He wasn't so big yet as to be given much of anything to carry on his way up the stairs. But he would go ahead of his father, and every couple of steps he would stop and look back, like he wanted to make sure that he was coming and that he wouldn't drop anything. The attic trap was opened, and up they went. Step one here was to lay out the big blanket, and Noah took it upon himself to do as his father did, to get it all nice and spread out on the attic floor, in front of the window looking out toward the lake in the distance. Utensils, napkins, cups were laid out, and then it was back down to the hall below. Lucas peeked into the room, caught Maya's eye and looked down to Noah. She gave a small nod and he picked him up, brought him to the bed to join his mother and brother. Now Lucas could go and get the plates. He might have left him upstairs, but as generally well behaved as he was, Noah was still just two years old, and 'bright ideas' happened to the best of people.

As Lucas and Pappy Joe moved up toward the attic steps with the plates, they could hear Maya's voice from inside the room. She was telling the boys about the day Elliott was born, including how Lucas had gone and fallen down the basement stairs and hurt his foot right before Maya went into labor, how they had to get a ride from Mr. Sanderson up the road, and how Elliott was supposed to be born in June but he'd come early, on the last day of May, losing on his Junebug title from Granny Mel. To hear her, to see her with them in there, it just reminded Lucas – as though he needed to be reminded – how good of a mother she was with those little boys of theirs. One, and two, and soon three…

He would just look at her, and he would know how important it was to her, just to give them the very best life she could give them, in every moment of every day, so they could look back on it and be glad for the road they'd followed together. It was what he wanted, too, and it was what had united them to even get to this point, to even have this family they were creating and raising together. Three years today of their being parents, and they had been some of the richest in both their lives. Not always perfect, no, but always as true to them as they would ever hope to be.

Soon, Elliott would be brought up into the attic with his mother and his little brother, and their birthday boy would come upon his picnic breakfast and let the last traces of the morning's incident fly away. It was his day and it was theirs, the day he'd made them family.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners