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| Two peas in a pod |
As I did last year on your birthday, I tried to crystallize
some aspects of YOU as you are at three years old. It’s a poor attempt, because
you’re already a complicated guy, but hopefully one day you can read it with
interest.
·
You’re an excellent big brother—not jealous when
Col needs attention, eager to try to entertain him both when he’s happy and
when he’s angry, quick to present him with your toys to “play” with, and
declaring at least once a day how much you love your “bruzzer.” It melts my
heart. I know it won’t last, so I’m trying to capture it in my memory and in
pictures.
·
Your sense of time is developing, but it’s still
got a long way to go. Everything before today is “yesterday.” Everything in the
future is “tomorrow.” Various durations—hours, minutes, months—escape your
understanding. The main surprise during the last few months has been you
linking counting to elapsed time and sequentiality. For instance, you’ll say,
“I’m going to count to seven. When I get to four, it’s time for dinner. When I
get to five, it’s time for PJs. When I get to six, we can brush teeth, and at
seven, it’s time for bed.” (Why seven? Why do events begin at four? Who can
fathom the toddler mind?)
·
You. Remember. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. Example: the
other day we saw deer outside in the snow stripping the bark off trees and
talked about what animals eat in cold weather. Two days later, you were playing
with your PlaySkool Nativity scene and had the angel climbing a palm tree. When
I asked what the angel was doing, you said, “She’s eating the bark.”
·
You like reading Bible stories for kids. The
David and Goliath episode is a favorite right now (although I have mixed
feelings about its lessons). And especially this month, you’ve been sensitive
to Jesus’s birthday coming right before your own. I’m praying we can find a
Sunday school in Oxford as excellent as the one at our church in Newark.
·
You walk on your tiptoes in stocking feet. Like
on the knuckles with your toes curled under. It’s weird.
·
Your imagination games continue to improve by
leaps and bounds, facilitated by your expanding vocabulary and increasingly
complex syntax. On the way home from drop-in daycare near Ah-Bee and Pakka’s
house this week, I asked whether you played with anyone and you told me, “Yes.
I played with a boy named Owen. He was littler than me. We made presents for
Ah-Bee and Pakka and opened them, and inside Ah-Bee’s present there was a pogo
stick. And when we get back to Ah-Bee and Pakka’s house, she can use the pogo
stick to jump in the snow. But that might make a big hole in the snow, so you
have to be careful not to slip, okay?”
·
You take a nap in the afternoon and go to bed at
eight, and while you’re awake you have insane amounts of energy. Sometimes you channel this energy positively. See this video for an example from April:
·
When we chastise you or we say you can’t do
something (like send Col flying in his swing), you pout cartoonishly—head down,
shoulders slumped, lip out, shuffling feet, obstinate “hmph” noises. It’s hard
not to laugh, because I have no idea where you learned it, but you’ve got it
down pat.
·
You interact eagerly with kids from one to five
years old wherever you find them: church, museums, libraries, and of course
childcare centers. Sometimes they’re a little put off by your penchant for
pretending you’re (variously) Spiderman, Batman, Mr. Incredible, and Luke Skywalker,
but the cooler ones go along with it. (Also, when adults ask you your name, you
prefer to give one of these pseudonyms.) You’re getting better about grabbing
toys away from other kids when you want to play with them, but it definitely
still happens.
·
You sometimes love doing crafty stuff like
painting, making sticker pictures, folding “origami,” and cutting paper. At
other times you don’t have the attention span. You like coloring in rather than just coloring.
·
Most of the time you have a great attitude and it’s
easy to make you laugh. (One surefire way to get you in stitches is to feign
ignorance of the next item in a sequence: “One, two, three, seven” is an
absolutely hilarious utterance.)
·
But you’re still a toddler in many ways, with
tantrums and illogical desires and fears. I sometimes catch myself being too
hard on you because although you speak clearly and seem to reason, you are,
after all, only just three years old.
The bottom line is that your behavior is frustrating at
least once a day, but I absolutely adore you and love spending time with you. I
can’t wait to see what the year ahead holds for you.
