A love letter to Lucas, Age 4

My sweet Lucas, today you are FOUR years old!

In the last few weeks and months, so many of our family and friends have commented on how much you’ve grown up recently. You’ve lost your pudgy toddler stance and are now growing long and lean like your oldest brother. Your face is still sweetly soft, but most faint traces of the baby you were just yesterday are melting away. In this last year, you’ve moved from a crib to a bed and given up your soother — both a little later than planned, perhaps, but you can blame it on a mother who was not ready for you to grow up so quickly.

Lucas, you are a quirky fellow and an affable companion. We spend most Wednesdays together, just you and me, and I enjoy your company immensely. You are bright and observant and soak in the world around you. You are also extremely patient about having a lens pointed at you every day of your life. 🙂

This year in September you will start school, but you can already write your own name and you recognize numbers up to ten and most of the alphabet. We have to keep reminding ourselves that you are only three four, as you seem far beyond your years. The product of having two older brothers, perhaps?

You love crafts and art projects, but above all else you love to draw. You sit for surprising lengths of time each day churning out drawing after drawing of puffles from Club Penguin or Mario and Luigi or even the members of your family. Your figures are clearly recognizable, and you add details like skies and clouds and grass and flowers. I’ve been utterly charmed to watch you mimic Tristan, selecting a DVD box or a book and propping it in front of you and then painstakingly copying the pictures you see. At FOUR years old! (Oy, the amount of paper we recycle, as I try to hide your daily dozen or so sketches between the sections of discarded newspaper in the recycle bin! We’re endlessly grateful to Papa Lou for the reams of unused letterhead he has donated to your perpetual art studio!)

You’re a sweet and agreeable child, and one of my favourite peccadilloes of yours is a cheerful “Sure!” (which sounds more like “shore!”) when I propose something to you. One day before Christmas, we were in Costco and stopped for lunch. It was crowded and we shared our table with an East Indian woman who was quite taken with you. When she leaned in and asked if you would like to marry her little three-year-old granddaughter (“with hair down to here!” she said, pointing to her waist) I thought you would simply blush and turn away as you’re still not overly fond of strangers, but you gave her your best smile and that endearing “Sure!” You melted both our hearts!

You spend four days each week with your friends Maryke and Matthew at “Nana” Heidi’s house, and you have never once complained about going. You enjoy touring all the neighbourhood playgroups and drop-ins and storytime at the library with Nana Heidi, and through her you’re becoming a well-known Manotick figure – people I don’t know stop to say hi to you in the grocery store!

You love video games as much as your big brothers do. You introduced ME to Angry Birds, and you love Super Mario Kart too. Your favourite TV shows are Max and Ruby, Dora, Toopy and Binoo and lately Harry’s Bucket of Dinosaurs. You also love your books and bedtime storytime, and I think you prefer having Daddy read to you because you can always talk him in to one, two, three more books.

Lucas, I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of what makes you so adorable. This is a big year for you, as you head off to school in September. I watch your growing independence with bittersweet pride. It seems mere days ago that the whole of the Internet waited with excitement for the arrival of the Player to be Named Later. You’re not a baby anymore, but you’ll always be my baby, even when you tower over me on some not-too-distant day.

Happy birthday, my darling Lucas! We love you very much. 🙂