Hey! He has brown skin!

Today, we were fortunate to get to have a lunch out with some women from church. We met at a McDonalds with an indoor play area and let our kids play while we all got to visit. It was just what I needed!

While we were there, Noah had to coo over the new baby (“J”) of one of my friends from church. It is not the first time that we’ve seen “J.” Heck, Noah has even held him before. But, today, Noah was excited to notice something that he hadn’t noticed before.

“Hey!” He said to my friend, with a big, excited smile on his face. “He has brown skin!”

“Well, yes he does,” my friend (who, for the purposes of this story, I will add that she is white) said to Noah, with a smile. (It’s hard not to smile when Noah is so excited, because he is just so darn genuine.)

Noah continued to smile in the way that you smile about things that are super sweet, you know, like a picture of a little curly haired girl holding a kitten and eating an ice cream cone under a rainbow-filled sky.

He lovingly looked at baby “J” and said, “That reminds me of my bestest buddy Colin,” and then he excitedly told my friend, “He has brown skin too!”

It’s hard to know what my favorite part of this was. Was it that it took seeing baby “J” so many times before he noticed the color of his skin, or was it that it made him so excited? I’m not sure.

But, either way, I know that when people tell us “Oh, I’m sorry” or “That must be hard” when they find out that we have a son with Autism, that they don’t know how fully God has blessed our lives with that boy.