Lucas

My sweet and silly Lucas, happy birthday to you!

No longer the toddler tyrant my son, now you are a precocious and precious preschooler. Three years old! I can hardly believe it!

You, my littlest one, are relentlessly curious and in that aggravating endearing phase of questioning everything. Everything. EV-ERY-THING. Who knew “why” could be a dirty word? And one question begets another begets another begets another. I would never have guessed that anyone could ever hope to challenge Simon as the most talkative member of our family! And you have learned, as Tristan observed just last weekend, that repetition is the key to attention. You have been known to ask the same question three, four, five times in a row, in the exact same tone and inflection, patiently waiting for someone to finally hear you and respond. Call it the curse of the third brother!

You are finally a good sleeper, something I’m not sure I could say in your first or second birthday letters. And you are still, if not for much longer, sleeping in your crib! I’m sure your transition to a big-boy bed is mere weeks away, but congratulations to you for being the one who lasted longest of my three boys before achieving this milestone. I must admit, I will miss very much the sound of you calling out to me in your most sing-song voice when you wake up, “Mommy! Come and get me!” And I hope you never outgrow the ritual nighttime exchange with your Daddy, where on his way out the door he says, “Night-night Little One,” and you reply, “Night-night Big One.”

Some of your favourite things are jigsaw puzzles, action figure toys like the Smurf village and Imaginext playsets, colouring and crafts, and anything your older brothers show the slightest interest in. Your favourite TV shows are, inexplicably, Max and Ruby, Caillou and In the Night Garden. And all three of you boys are deep in the midst of a Smurf obsession.

You are gradually overcoming your earlier shyness, and you show signs of a romantic and jealous heart. You have a sweet and obvious crush on the 13 year old daughter of your daycare provider, but I think it’s safe to say the feeling is mutual. (It’s okay, though, your father has a thing for older women as well.)

You were once a hearty eater, but toddlerhood has made you fickle. Your favourite foods are yougurt, toast, egg whites and most fruits and vegetables. You’re less fond of certain family favourites like pizza and guacamole, but there’s time to rectify that yet. One of your favourite dinnertime rituals is the daily questioning of each member of the family: “How was you day, Mommy?” “How was you day, Simon?” “How was you day, Tristan?” “How was you day, Daddy?” And of course, the conversation may not progress until someone has asked you the same in return.

You are smart beyond your years (observes your mother in a completely unbiased fashion). You have a wicked memory and can “read” board books to me verbatim after having heard them only a few times. You have also learned how to both entice your brothers to do your bidding and enrage them with just a few words or actions. I suppose that’s the nature of brothers!

You love music and you love to sing. Your favourite songs are Lukey’s Boat, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, You are my Sunshine, and K’naan’s Waving Flag. It’s beyond cute to hear you singing to yourself, as you play contentedly with your jigsaw puzzles or lie waiting for me to retrieve you from your crib, “When I get older, I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag (And then it goes back, and then it goes back, and then it goes back, woa-oah-oh…).”

Because you are the littlest, we tend to forget that you are, in fact, quite large for your age. While walking down the street one fine day last autumn, a stranger looked at you chasing your brothers and laughed. “He’s a big boy, that one,” said the stranger. “Better get him enrolled in football!” It’s only when we see you playing with other kids your age do we notice that you’re more the size of a four-year-old than a toddler — and you speak more clearly than some four-year-olds we know, too!

You are the child of a thousand nicknames: Lukey, Luke, Lukey-Lou, Pookie, Pook, and yes, even Poo. I’m sorry about that last one. It was your brothers’ idea. Speaking of brothers, you’ve finally learned the difference between the two of them, but it charms me every time you refer to them as “the brudders”, as in “Mommy! The brudders won’t let me play with them!” Or “No, I didn’t do it, the brudders did it.”

I could go on, my darling boy. You are funny, sweet, and altogether delightful. You love to joke and to indulge your old mum’s sense of humour. Our quiet Wednesdays together are one of the best days in my week. Could you please stay three forever?

Happy birthday, my handsome Lucas. I love you!

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Lucas has been sick for a couple of days now — fever, snot, cough, and holding his ears on and off. He’s been getting worse instead of better, and fearing ear infections or other bacterial infections, I made an appointment with the on-call ped today.

Even though he has not previously had any problems with going to the doctor, as soon as we told him that’s where we were going, he started to fuss. “No doctor, no doctor!” he cried as we tried to put on his coat and shoes.

“Okay,” I told him to settle him, cringing at the idea of a 30-minute drive downtown with a howling toddler, “we’ll just go look at some flowers. Would you like to go look at the flowers?” Thankfully, this appeared to be a much better idea than going to the doctor. And, knowing we would be swinging down Queen Elizabeth past Dows Lake just as the tulip beds were reaching full bloom, there would in fact be lots of flowers to admire on the way. To the doctor.

I should have known that on a perfectly sunny April morning, odds were better than good that Queen Elizabeth would be closed, and it was. I thought maybe the cows and the other bits of minutaie we’d admired on the way into town would have sufficed, but Lucas has a longer memory that I would have given him credit for. We were in and out of the ped’s office in about six minutes — no ear infection, clear lungs, just a wickedly bad cold — and on our way out Lucas looked at me and said, “Where are the flowers?”

I looked around and considered for a minute. I had a long to-do list in my head that did not include walking around the Glebe looking at the flowers. I didn’t even have my camera with me — for shame! But, it was a gorgeous morning. And the flowers were pretty. And, most importantly, a little walk around the block would both allow me to keep my word and make Lucas happy. The to-do list could wait.

As we set off around the block, I was still a little preoccupied. Ugh, I thought, did I choose the longest block in the Glebe? Could I get away with just walking a couple dozen meters and then turning around? But the sun was warm and the air was fresh, and as we stopped to admire magnolia petals and fading daffodils and interesting-looking stones, I found myself relaxing and enjoying the walk.

Lucas is normally a “me do it” kind of toddler, quite impatient with the idea of being held back by anything, so it might have been the fact that he was feeling unwell or just the moment that made him hold so tightly to my hand as we walked. I realized, as we inspected some particularly fascinating berries growing on a shrub, that in that moment I was perfectly content. Yes, I still had an otherwise miserably sick toddler on my hands, and I still had a lot of other crap to take care of during the rest of the day, and now it would take me just a little bit longer to get it all done.

But, in that sunny amble that took the best part of half an hour, my two-year-old son reminded me of the kernel of truth in the hoariest of clichés — you really do have to remember to stop and smell look at the flowers sometimes.

Thanks, Lucas.

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My dear darling Lucas,

You are TWO today! Two years old! My goodness, was it not just last week that you arrived, late and large, to join our family? (And of course, on the other hand, have you not always been with us? How quiet our lives must have been before we had three boys contributing to the cacaphony!)

You, my son, are a delightful child. Smart, sweet and loving, you charm all who know you. You are also stubborn, strong-willed, jealous and territorial. Did I mention stubborn? Not to mention the fact that you’re a bit of a brute, regularly taking on your big brothers and coming out the victor. I’ve stopped protecting you from them and now expend my efforts protecting them from you!

You love to draw and to colour. You astonish me by actually colouring on, if not within the lines of, the images in your favourite Sesame Street colouring book. We no longer put stray papers in the recycling bin but keep them handy for your daily colouring exploits, and I’ve given up on putting the crayons away after each use and simply leave them near the table where you can help yourself. The other day, you turned over a blank page to find the original notice from the big boys’ school and my mouth dropped open in wonder as you started calling out various letters of the alphabet as you scribbled over the text. Not even two yet and you realize the difference between text and images!

Also at not-quite-two, you can count beyond 10, make a pretty good stab at the ABCs and mimic just about any song. I love to listen to you sing yourself to sleep with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Yet, brilliant as you obviously are, you stubbornly refuse to regularly differentiate between your two older brothers. They continue to be the two-headed brother creature with interchangeable names.

You’re a moderately good sleeper, waking occasionally in the night and asking to snuggle into bed with your Daddy, who is far more a sucker than me. You’ve just come through a patch of resisting going to sleep at bed time, but I suffer no delusion that you won’t soon be standing in your crib again, flipping the light switch on and off to get our attention. No bedtime would be complete without a cuddle from Mommy and your precious “blankey and soo”.

My dear Lucas, you are so very two. Terrible twos indeed! But your old mother is getting crafty in her dotage: I’ve learned to ask permission before taking the banana out of the peel before I hand it to you or (god forbid) snapping the cookie in half. I’ve learned that you’ll accept a swap for whatever treasure you’ve acquired (permanent markers and tiny bits of Lego come to mind) without a fight, but you’ll scream blue murder if I simply try to take them away from you. I’ve learned that you may in fact be just barely two, but you think you are the equal of your older brothers and fully entitled to participate in any and all mischief into which they might get.

You love Sesame Street, the Muppets, the Wonderpets, Bob the Builder, Thomas trains and Lego — especially the tiniest not-safe-for-toddlers pieces of Lego. You will play contentedly for long stretches of time, lining up action figures or trains on the edge of a table, and you love to sit on the floor with me passing a train or car or even a ball back and forth. You love books, and while you will occasionally entertain yourself with one, you much prefer to have them read to you. Tristan’s lap is just the right size to accommodate you, but even Simon will give a good stab at narrating the pictures in a book to “read” to you.

You are not particularly fond of strangers, and it amazes me that the third child in any family could be the most shy one. You have a most endearing way of nodding your head solemnly when I ask you something, and an equally adorable way of laughing out a shouted “Yes!!” when you are particularly excited.

Despite your shyness with strangers, you have an entertainer’s love of the spotlight. When you notice you have your family’s attention, you are quite the ham. Your favourite trick lately is to shake your arms with wide eyes to the boys’ laughing exhortation of “show us your muscles!” You are endlessly patient with your brothers’ requests to have you repeat just about anything they can think of: “Lucas, say ‘Mario Brothers.’ Say ‘Luigi’! Say ‘pumpernickel’!” You never seem to tire of this, nor do they.

Sweet Lucas, you are more delightful by the day. Challenging though your capricious moods and vexing needs may be, you more than make up for them with the joy you bring to every moment of our days. Happy birthday, my little one. You are loved.

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