“Just let me take care of you!” I yelled at my four year old as I chased him around our beanbag chairs. I was trying to get him to let me put a cold-pack on his forehead, which was rapidly developing quite the goose egg.
The end of summer sun filters through the needles of the big pine tree, throwing shadows on the green weeds in front of me. The cicadas trill out, calling to each other in their waning days. The clear sky spreads overhead, stretching out to the autumn season so close that you can taste it in the cooling air.
Thump. I jumped up from the couch, startled by the noise. Running into my younger son’s room, I saw him on the floor. “Are you okay?” I asked. “No,” he said. He says “no” when he actually means yes and he seemed okay.
But I wasn’t okay. He had climbed out of his crib.
My younger son has always been little, despite wanting to be big. He shoved his way into the world three-and-a-half weeks early, being born at a mere five and a half pounds. He didn’t pass zero percent on the growth chart until he was a year old. And he’s the baby of the family. So my nickname for him is Little Bird.
Little Bird just turned three years old.
In the spirit of Sandra Boynton’s classic board book Little Pookie, where the small pig’s mom tells them 10 things she knows about them, here are ten things I know about Little Bird (as written to him, as in the book) on the occasion of his third birthday:
“I want daddy,” my older son (nicknamed Sprout) responded when asked who he wanted to read bedtime stories with. In the past, I would have been choking back tears. These days, I feel differently.
“Mama, [kid’s classmate] told me he was stronger than me,” said my five year old, nicknamed Sprout. “But I’m faster than him.”
“Well, you can tell him that you’re faster than him,” I responded, then immediately regretted it. “Actually, no. That wouldn’t be a good thing to say.” One, I had no idea if my kid was actually faster than the other kid. Two and more importantly, starting a comparison war was going to lead to nowhere good very quickly.
“Back in my day, kids roamed the neighborhood without supervision and nobody had these fancy birthday parties,” says yet another article about how childhood was different “back then.” While the world has changed for the good and the bad, I feel like my children’s experience isn’t all that different in some ways than mine or even my mom’s. Looking forward, it’s different in so many good ways as well.
Holding the hand of a little girl with my fiancé holding her other hand, I thought, “Perhaps this is what having kids is like.”
That’s because the little girl was not our daughter. She was one of the three girls that were part of the summer camp where my fiancé, Chris, and I were volunteering. To be honest, those three girls were the entire summer camp. But they were more than enough. Besides being the first kids to break my heart, they gave me a peek into what my fiancé would be like as a father.