Dear Shiloh at 7! |

Dear Shiloh at 7!

by elizabeth on April 28, 2026

Wow, Shiloh! It has been a few years since I’ve written one of these. I think once we started documenting so much of our life online, I let these blog entries slip away. Sage told me how much she loves looking back and reading her old entries, so that motivated me to come back to this site and write one for you.

Shiloh, happy birthday, my love. You are seven, and I just can’t believe it. Every day with you gets better and better. I am so happy to see you when you come upstairs in the morning, and if I could, I would hug and kiss you all day. I tell you all the time how much I love you and how lucky I am that you are in our family.

You bring such a calm, grounded sweetness to our group. You can get silly and laugh until your belly hurts, but you also really love your quiet time, like gazing out the window in the morning before you even get out of bed. You think deeply, you notice everything, you like to reflect, and you genuinely enjoy having time to yourself.

You are also extremely hard on yourself. You hold yourself to very high standards in school and in life. You want to be perfect, so when you get a math question wrong or do something you think was wrong, you fall apart. You never want to disappoint us. I am trying to help you understand that the only way we learn is by making mistakes, but I think you would prefer to never make one!

You still love imaginary play, which I adore. You build whole worlds with your Magnatiles, your Lego guys, your stuffies, and the Sylvanian Families we have on the boat. Yesterday you were playing with toy cars. You love building forts and making cozy little spots where you can curl up with your stuffed animal friends. You love your stuffies so much and are almost always sleeping with one tucked into your arms. Tumble is your favorite, but you also love Fluffy, the otters, Puppy, and the polar bear. They’re all Jellycats, and truly just the best. You also still love your silver Barefoot Dreams blanket.

You love to swim and are often eager for one of us to get in the water with you. You love to dive deep and have zero fear around being in the water or encountering animals while you are there. You are such a natural freediver. You love to take a big breath and pull yourself down the anchor chain, or challenge yourself to swim to the bottom and grab a fistful of sand, which you proudly bring to the surface to show me. You are constantly impressing Daddy with how far you can dive and how long you can hold your breath underwater.

You are quietly brave. One of my favorite stories about you is from the day we were all standing around talking and talking about whether we should do backflips off the side of the boat, and while the rest of us were still discussing it, you just quietly went and did one. You were five. That is so you.

You don’t love being the center of attention. You prefer to observe before fully jumping into something. You aren’t easily scared. You have such a tender heart, but I wouldn’t necessarily call you sensitive. You LOVE to snuggle, and when you’re in a snuggle mood, there is really no escaping it. You often wrap yourself around me and refuse to let me get up until you decide the snuggle is over.

Every single day I look at you and think about how lucky I am to have you, and how lucky I am to have three beautiful, healthy children to spend my days with. It also makes me a little sad sometimes, because I have loved being a mother so much that part of me wants to keep doing the part where you are all little, again and again. It’s an exhausting chapter, but it feels so purposeful to be needed in that way.

Watching you grow up is exciting because I get to witness who you are becoming, but I also miss the time I can never get back. What you need from me and how you connect to me is evolving, and some days I find it challenging to adjust.

I often reflect on the irony that you came into our life and made everything feel easier. How does adding another child make things easier?! You helped me understand my purpose more deeply, and you helped me relax and enjoy the mind-blowing beauty, fun, and privilege of a life with children. The blessings of a messy and chaotic home. Yes, I feel overwhelmed sometimes. Yes, it feels hard. Yes, sometimes I want to hide under the covers in silence. But never, not once, do I wish I were doing anything else.

By the time we welcomed you to our family, I had enough experience raising children that I could relax more and really soak it all in. When I feel sad that you are still most likely, very likely, almost certainly, our last, (I do like to save a sliver of hope for a miracle, haha) I remind myself that I didn’t miss a moment. I didn’t rush through your babyhood. I enjoyed you and celebrated you and snuggled you and watched you and felt grateful for you every single day of your life. I still do. Even though it has flown by, I have not missed it. I have not let one second be taken for granted.

There is still a special ache in knowing I may not get to experience birth again, or breastfeeding again, or having one more little person in our home. Because motherhood feels like a calling, those losses can stop me in my tracks. But you have taught me to hold that sadness alongside so much gratitude. You teach me to slow down, to think before I speak, and to adjust my parenting to what you need.

I love you so much, Shiloh. Happy seventh birthday, my sweet boy.

I asked you some birthday questions this year, and it will be fun to revisit them when you are older:

What is one of your talents?
Waterskiing.

What do you like to eat?
Homemade mac and cheese from The Peach, gummy bears, broccoli, carrots, kiwis, cucumber, tomato, hamburgers, and hot dogs.

What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Mint chocolate chip and chocolate.

What is your favorite song?
“Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone.

What do you love most about yourself?
That I am snuggly and cute.

What are you afraid of?
Really, really high slides and jumps.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
A trillionaire. I want to be an actor. I think you’re saying that because Sage and I tell you that you would be a good actor. You also said you just want to be a normal human. And then you said, “I want to be Santa when I grow up.”

What do you dream of doing?
“My dream is to still get Christmas presents when I grow up.”

Here are some facts I’ve noted down, including some from when you were younger during the few years when I skipped this letter. The old ones are just so cute, I don’t want to lose them.

This year you learned to read. You are in first grade, and you are making such fast progress in your academics. You are a natural at math, and your reading is really taking off. I love that I get to spend your school days with you, watching you learn.
For your birthday, you used your birthday money to buy a bracelet that connects to an app where you can track a wild animal. The animal you chose to track was a shark. We got back and looked up the animal, and we were really excited when we realized it was a hammerhead named Valentina. Valentina was swimming off the coast of Florida, and then you got so sad. You said you wanted your money back because you thought that if you had the bracelet, the shark would come to us. It was heartbreaking because you were so upset. So now I have decided we need to find Valentina. I hope someday we do.
You lost your first two teeth this year.
We have this joke where one of us says, “I love you more than you love me,” and the other person says, “not poss,” which is a shortened version of “not possible.”
We got one of those eggs that you get wet and it hatches. We were getting excited that a unicorn was going to come out of it, and it was sooooo sweet because you thought it was real. You said, “Is a baby unicorn really going to come out of that egg?”
You got a big belly cut just after you turned six when we were rock climbing in Kalymnos with Sarah and Daniel. You fell when a rock came loose and got a really big scratch.
When you were six, you visited Greece, Albania, Italy, Spain, the Canary Islands, Portugal, the U.S., Barbados, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Barths.
You and Cedar are attached at the hip. You two are the best of friends. You will sleep together all night, and when you wake up, the first place you choose to go is right next to him when he’s reading. I am so grateful for the relationship you two have, and I sincerely hope it lasts your whole lives.
You and Cedar play the hornswaggled game, which is totally inappropriate but makes you two laugh.

Some funny things from the last few years that I don’t want to forget:

You call grizzly bears “grizzle bears.”
You call pine cones “pine corns.”
Instead of “believe,” you say “bu-blieve.”
You used to talk about these make-believe grandparents all the time. You had entire stories about them. They lived in Portugal, they traveled the world, and it was so cute. You loved making up all kinds of stories about them.
“Welcome to Yew Nork,” your version of the Taylor Swift song.
Up until recently, you said “aminals” instead of “animals.”
For a very long time, you were saying “yey” instead of “they.”
“Ezample” instead of “example.”
You were upset at Dad once and said, “Dad didn’t help an inch.”
Instead of “exhausted,” you said, “I’m resausted.”
I asked you what your perfect day would be, and you said, “to be with my best friends.” You asked me to guess who your best friends were, and Cedar guessed Tumble. You said yes. You said you would play PS5 and Nintendo with him because he has one, and sometimes you play together. You would play Lego City and Mario Kart. You said you would eat Tumble’s favorite gummy, which is a sour gummy where half is sweet and half is sour. You also said, “Me and Tumble’s house is going to be with a treehouse and the bedrooms are going to be six meters. And also I want to play and wrestle with Lucy.” Lucy is Josh’s sister on the sailboat Cely.
You said you did a magic trick and “levigrated the magnet.”
You call a yogurt parfait a “yogurt barfait.”
Hardboiled eggs are called “scramble toast eggs.”
Cinnamon is “cimamim.”
Peter said, “Here, have some chicken,” and you said, “What is it?” Peter said, “It’s chicken,” and you said, “But is it cow?”
You went through the cutest phase where you started every day asking me what baby animal you were that day. You liked puppy and kitty, and because of your blonde hair, I picked “baby polar bear” a lot.
You said, “Can we go out to dinner at that place we went to the day after yesterday?”