52ish months

Oh Love,
These little letters to you are becoming a little more difficult to compose. You are a 4 year old. You have FOUR years under your belt. You do so much. You say so much. You say so much in the things you don't say or do. These letters are increasingly difficult because you're just so damn complex. Your sister is too, of course, but hers are still in the easy-phase.. the 'you love avocado! you clap along to music! you love fart sounds! you sign milk!' phase of things. Very black and white, no-trouble-deciphering. You, my boy, are very much entering the gray phase of matters, that all us adults exist in. SCARY! Your emotions change in very intense complicated ways, hourly. And it's very clear a lot of the time how nonstop your  wheels are turning. Let's just get right to it...
* The other day, from the backseat of the car while we were driving somewhere, you said 'hey mommy, I know how to spell nothing!'..  (me) 'ok, spell it!'...  'N-U-F-N. nothing (nuffin)' EXACTLY.
* You LOVE to inform me of Avery's antics. If she's doing something troublesome, you absolutely live to tell me about it. It's a concept I can 100% understand, as a fellow firstborn child. When your younger sibling is about to get into trouble, it's just good business that you be the one who helps it along. So, one time while I was cooking dinner, stupidly giving Avery the benefit of the doubt and not having her contained somewhere (pack-n-play/exersaucer..), you started screaming 'OH! MOMMY! AVERY! LOOK!'.. your frantic-ness was too intense to even form whole sentences, so I knew some bad shit was about to go down. Avery had used an ottoman to assist her up on top of a glass-topped side table, and she was perilously perched there with a very concerned face of 'this was a good idea at first, but now I don't know what to do heeeeelp!'..  So I picked her little adventurous hiney up and praised you for alerting me about it. You glowed, obviously. It's a fine line though, because coming up in elementary school years, you'll quickly learn that no one likes a tattler. During playdates, you'll often run over to me and say something like 'he pushed me and I told him to stop and he didn't!' or 'he's going up the slide very dangerously, but I'm not' .. And while sometimes, it's helpful to be alerted of such things, a lot of the time it worries me that you're on a slippery slope to becoming the class tattle-tale. You mean well, of course, but it's something we're working on..  I think I say 'just worry about yourself' about a dozen times a day. But then I also am way too dependent on you to inform me of Avery's thrill-seeking whereabouts.. so it's probably not your fault if you're a little confused! Sorry.
* You find such joy in the simplest things. Just this morning, you went to go get dressed after breakfast, and 10 seconds later you came running back out of your room, still in Superman pjs, squealing - 'look! I'm in blue pants, a blue shirt, AND blue underwear! I'm a blue boy!!' You laughed and laughed as if this were the greatest thing you'd ever discovered. You love to find different shapes in your food.. you'll eat some bites of a cracker or something and hold it up and say what it looks like, and man oh man, it always looks exactly like what you say it does. You get so excited when I add something to your plate at mealtimes that is not normally added.. like a pickle spear or something, and when you sit down and see it you clasp your hands together and scream OH BOY! It really takes so little.
* You take great joy in the responsibility of pushing Avery in the stroller. When we're about to go on a walk, you always ask me 'can I please push my baby?'.. as if this isn't the routine every time, and when I say yes (because I'll take any opportunity to come off as an awesome mom) you get so excited. And you know to hand the stroller-reigns over to me when we cross the street, never any questions asked.
* You recently had a short 1-day bout of diarrhea. It had been a while since you had ever had it, the last time being so far back that you had obviously forgotten what it was like, and you were scared. You called me in (you've been doing your business without my knowledge or assistance for a long time now) to help you wipe, and you were crying and shaking, not because you were physically ill, but because you were scared of what just happened to you. You called it 'dynamite'. And that intense fear of having 'dynamite' again had such a bad mental effect on you that you refused to poop for almost 2 days. This.. was not a fun time. You refused to eat and literally laid in the floor of your room, moaning and whining and saying how your belly hurt, refusing to go do the deed. We tried everything short of bribing you to just GO, but eventually you went (yes, I totally did give you Miralax water to help things along..), and you practically cackled laughing when you were done. You ranted out loud, saying 'I was so scared of the dynamite! but it was normal poop! I had nuffin to be scared of!!! hahahaha!!!' Oh yes. You talked about this for days, I kid you not. How you were scared to poop and then decided to be brave, and it was all ok. I hope you can see how this lesson can be applied in many areas of life. Life's too short to be afraid of a little dynamite.
* You can spell like nobody's business. Which makes communicating to your father very difficult. Once you have your own child who is old enough to know what's what, you will understand that it's just best for everyone to SPELL things. Don't even THINK of uttering any buzz-words such as cookie, ice cream, movie, bath, bedtime, etc etc..  It's a sad new chapter in life when you can no longer successfully pull the wool over your own kids eyes. Not sure how, because we never taught you (oh hell no, we don't teach you how to spell the buzz-words), but we spelled the word 'Wii' the other day, and you perked up and asked us if we were talking about the wii, and seriously can I play it right now, please oh pleeeeease??! It's totally game over at a certain point when you can't spell things in front of your own kid. At one point, when you weren't a star-speller, you would simply ask us 'what does that spell? why are you spelling that?'.. SO, I would give an equally simple answer, 'we spell things because we don't want you to hear what we're talking about.' This simple reply seemed to please you, because you said OK! and went about your business. Those days are over, but it was nice while it lasted.
* You are an expert cleaner. I think you find it somewhat virtuous to get a room as tidy as possible. Of course, it's never just out of the blue.. but when I ask you to pick up a room, you whip that room into shape! Sometimes, as I am pouring praise onto you, it's mixed with a bit of embarrassment because the room truly looks more tidy than if I had attempted it myself. This is a very handy trait, my love, for your sister is a walking hurricane of destruction, so you bring great balance to this family.


You bring much love, too. We LOVE YOU!