I love you like a rocketship

To my boys at bedtime, I say--and have always said--"I love you from earth to sky" with only slight variations. Cass comes up with some pretty amazing, if not winding and long-winded, always-changing variations of his own, involving traveling around the moon, the stars, several planets, into distant orbits, down infinite rainbows, until finally coming back to the earth. 

In such classic Ollie-ness, Ollie has a much more succinct, never-varying response:

M: I love you from earth to sky.
O: Like a rocketship.

It's his standard answer, tried and true, almost every night. 

So when I asked him a few weeks ago what he wanted for his birthday, and he said "a wocket!", it packed a more emotional wallop than most three-year-old birthday rocketship requests. I spent a couple days building a cardboard rocket and space station for him and his buddies to play in, and our friend from Supino made a pizza shaped like a rocketship. The party was as wild as Ollie--in an intoxicating three-year-old kind of way. That night, falling into bed more exhausted and exhilarated than ever, he whispered "I love you like a rocketship" as I cuddled in beside him, and I knew exactly what he meant -- soaring, bigger than life, more than anything in this physical world. "I love you like a rocketship, too, baby boy."