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.

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So I had this idea that I would live-blog Lucas’s move to a big-boy bed. I mean, this is the last time I get to do this, right? After nine years of faithful and nearly constant service (save for a quick break from 2006 through 2008) this crib has logged near-constant use.

I even sat Lucas down in his room on the weekend so I could take a few pictures of him to memorialize the occasion.

He’s been ready for the big-boy bed for a lot longer than I’ve been ready. Beloved even proposed that we leave the crib behind when we moved in October. There was no way, though, that I was freeing Lucas from baby-jail any sooner than I absolutely had to!

It was Tristan who traumatized me for life on the idea of transitioning to big-boy beds. He was 20 months old when we turfed him from the crib to make room for Simon and I was 100 months pregnant, and he absolutely refused to stay in his bed. We put up a baby gate to keep him upstairs, and we’d find him at the top of the stairs at the end of the evening in a little camp he’d created for himself with his blanket, pillow and soother. And I won’t even get into the midnight rambles and the shock of waking up to a toddler staring at me at all hours of the night. *shudder*

And so, here we are. I’ve read Lucas his three nightly books, secured his soother, and carefully tucked him into his big-boy bed. I’m waiting for the shenanigans to begin.

And waiting.

And waiting.

…

*nothing*

So I creep back down the hallway 30 minutes later, and he’s fast asleep, curled into a perfect little ball and looking more like a newborn in that giant bed than the oversized preschooler he is.

The next sound I hear from him is nine hours later, just a few minutes after I open my own eyes and before I’ve broken the seal on my flanneliciously warm bed. “Mo-ommy!” comes his sing-song voice from the next room. “Come and get me!” Just like he has called me after every nap and sleep for months.

Not much in the way of riveting blog fodder, I’ll grant you that — but it sure was a sweet way to wake up!

Goodbye, lovely crib. I still remember agonizing over spending what seemed like an exorbitant amount of money on it (I think it was $300 or so) but had I had even an inkling of the years of faithful service and happy memories it would bring, I would have happily paid triple that. (And now, due to changing Health Canada regulations on drop-sided cribs, it’s consigned to the scrap heap. Sigh.)

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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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We seem to have a lot of nicknames going on in our family. I suppose I started the whole trend of renaming things which already had perfectly good names with the whole “Beloved” thing, way back when I started the blog in early 2005. Then sometime last year, for reasons that were never clear,Tristan started calling his father Hacko-tato, and Simon picked right up on it. Now, likely as not, when they’re trying to get his attention, they don’t say “Daddy” or even “Dad” but Hacko. I think Beloved has even grown to like it.

Tristan seems to have the most nicknames. Tristy, T-bird, Tee-Tee — he answers to all of them. Simon, I think, is the most dissatisfied with his own name. Tristan calls him Simo, which seems to irritate Simon just enough to guarantee that Tristan will take every opportunity to call him that for the rest of their lives.

It’s Lucas who got the short end of the stick in the nickname game. I swear, I did not see this one coming. It started with the innocuous derivative Lukey, which I figured would mature into Luke for our English friends and Luc for our French friends. However, Lukey was just a consonant’s jump from Pookey, which is kind of cute for a baby, but really unfortunate for a baby with reflux issues. For most of his first year, I fought hard against the tide to make sure Pookey was not called Pukey.

Once the battle with reflux was won, I figured he was safe from the stigma of a nickname inspired by a biological process. I was wrong.

You know what Tristan, Simon and Beloved call my darling third son, likely as not? Drop the last syllable from Pookey. Yes, it is sad but true. They call him Poo.

Beloved insists it’s not “Poo” but “Pooh” as in Pooh Bear. I’m not sure the “h” is going to matter when he hits school-age with a moniker like that. I tell ya, it’s a good thing that boy is going to be 6’6″ and 200 lbs by the time he hits high school. He’s going to need it.

Does this look like Poo to 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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Yesterday, Lucas said his first sentence, complete with subject, verb, object and preposition: “I play with Lego!” (Yes, the exclamation point was obviously in there.) Funny, he is exactly the same age – not quite 21 months – that Tristan was when Tristan said his first full sentence: “I bump head.” Sadly, Simon’s first sentence has been lost to the sands of time.

It’s a relief to finally be able to interact with Lucas on a verbal level. He clearly understands almost everything we say, and mimics us with startling clarity. With words come reason; I can begin to explain cause-and-effect and temporal relationships, making my life so incredibly much easier. And Lucas is obviously delighted to be finally able to express himself, his desires, his concerns. “I draw!” he often says, as Tristan does his homework. “Juice!” he demands, pointing at the cupboard where the cups are kept. “3-2-1-beep!” he calls, pointing at the microwave that warms his bottle.

His favourite expression, and ours, is an enthusiastic and undeniably Buckwheat-like “O-TAY!!” of agreement. While trick-or-treating with his brothers last weekend, I couldn’t quite convince him to say “trick or treat” as he shyly gazed at the strangers smiling down at him. I’d say “Can you say ‘trick or treat’?” and he’s reply with a loud and bright “O-TAY!!” that seemed to charm the candy-givers even more than a shy “trick or treat” might have. We left many smiles in our wake as we roamed the neighbourhood.

This morning, he utterly delighted me by peering around the edge of the newspaper I was reading and saying, “Hi baby!”

Some day, he’s going to get a lot of traction from that line…

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These are the things I want to remember about life with 20-month old Lucas. I write them here because they are ephermal, because they’ll disappear in the blink of an eye or the beat of a heart and I won’t even notice they’re gone, and someday I’ll be sad that I didn’t capture them a little bit better.

I want to remember how he says “Yeah!” with such enthusiasm when you ask him a question, like “Do you want to wear your Bob the Builder jammies tonight?” and he says it so that you cannot mistake the exclamation mark at the end.

I want to remember how he grabs me around the neck and squeezes hard when I pick him up, often crushing his face into mine in a sweetly aggressive sort of mashed-up kiss, as if he has just a little bit too much love for an ordinary hug and kiss to express.

I want to remember how even though he is perfectly capable of saying “Nimon” he calls both of his brothers “Tittan”. He started out calling them “Ninon” and “Ninnan”; now, they are the two-headed brother monster with one name.

I want to remember how he begs for whatever bit of tasty treat you’ve got not unlike a labrador puppy might, by standing as close to you as he can making obvious eye contact with you, all the while encouraging you to share with a musical “Mmm hmmm! Mmm hmmm!”

I want to remember how he must be just like his big brothers in all things, and how he loves to draw when they draw and play with lego when they play with lego. I really don’t think it’s occured to him that they are any older or any different than he is.

I want to remember how he loves certain videos and how he asks for them by ‘name’. Bob the Builder is of course “Bob!” (always with the audible exclamation mark) and Blues Clues is “Puppy!” The Muppets episode with Mark Hamill is less easy to convey; he gargles in the fashion of Angus McGonagle, the Argyle Gargoyle who gargles Gershwin. I’ll need to get the new Flip video camera out for that one, I think.

I want to remember how he loves for us to sing “Old Macdonald” in the car, and how when we pause to allow him to name an animal, he says “Cow!” each and every time, over and over again. (And yes, the exclamation mark is audible on that one, too. I think like any new skill that gets acquired by a toddler, he’s busy incorporating the exclamation into his repetoire through fierce and constant repetition.)

I want to remember how hard it is not to laugh when he is vexed and falls to the floor in a disappointed heap, not exactly throwing a tantrum but utterly exasperated by being denied the whimsy of his desire.

I want to remember his good ear for mimicry, and how he can repeat several words in a sing-song of sounds even though he’s only stringing together a word or two at a time. He will stack up a couple of blocks and then look at me and say, “Don’t you do it!” daring me not to knock over his tower the way he knocks down the ones I build for him. And he is pitch-perfect in capturing my tone as he climbs up onto the table and then scolds himself: “Git DOWN!”

I want to remember the way he chortles with glee and relief when we say it’s time for “Blankey and Soo” the bedtime duo. “Banky Sooooooo” he repeats.

I want to remember the way he looks solemnly into my eyes each night as I tell him the story of his day, agreeing with “Mmm hmm” to the key points, around his mouthful of soother.

I want to remember how utterly beautiful, and exasperating, and exhausting, and fulfilling it can be to parent the ball of curious and relentless and lovingly adorable energy that is Lucas at 20 months. It’s so hard to believe some days that it won’t be like this forever, that it might not be like this next month…

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I was checking my e-mail and playing on the computer early yesterday morning when my “uh oh, it’s a little *too* quiet” radar went off.

I poked my nose into the kitchen, and found Lucas kneeling contentedly smack in the middle of the kitchen table, a half-eaten apple in his hand.

Makes a pretty good companion to the mischief in the pantry picture, don’t you think?

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The word chaos keeps creeping into my life lately.

A friend recently asked me if the jump from two kids to three was really that much of a change. After I finished snickering, I replied, “You know how with two kids, life can have these intensely chaotic peaks, with streches of peace and calm in the middle? Yeah. Three is just all chaos, all the time. No peaceful stretches. Just. Chaos.”

And then my dad has taken up a new pet phrase. He says, “I don’t do chaos.” Interestingly, he seems to have adopted this pet phrase after spending a good portion of his summer with a house full of grandchildren. Coincidence?

Life with three kids is busy, true, but the chaos comes almost exclusively thanks to Lucas, my just-turned-18-months-old perpertual chaos machine.

I love the toddler phase, I really do. No parenting phase is so peppered with daily hourly delight, with instant gratification, with a deep and overwhelming exasperation. My jaw drops open in wonder regularly, and I am in awe of his capacity for learning, for comprehension, for love, for anger, for curiousity, for stubbornness. He is a living ball of excesses, and leaves in his wake a path of chaos and destruction that has very nearly broken our parenting spirit.

My boy finds mischief the way hogs find truffles — he’s biologically drawn to it. He has a radar that senses unlatched gates and cupboards, and a magnetic attraction to everything that’s inappropriate for a toddler to have. The latter includes choking hazards like Lego and peanuts and grommets, inedible consumables like shampoo and Wii remotes, and garden-variety trouble like pets’ water bowls, potting soil and permanent markers…. and that only covers the michief he found before breakfast the other day.

Sigh.

I imagine he keeps a daily tally sheet in his head. “Okay, so far today I’m up seven exasperating actions to five adorable ones. I better step up the cuteness, or they’re going to leave me at the curb with the trash. Hmmm, what have I got in the arsenal for today? Oh, I know, I’ll run up and throw my arms around her knees while yelling a gleeful ‘Mummmmeeeeeeeee!’ That’ll buy me at least three more transgressions before dinner.”

Living with a toddler is all about extremes. Or maybe it’s just this toddler. I’m so tired and wired and sheerly wiped out that I can’t remember last Tuesday, let alone going through this twice before. Or maybe the toddler phase is like childbirth: we’re biologically and psychologically hardwired to forget the trauma almost as soon as it passes, to ensure the continuing perpetuation of the species?

I can handle the relentless mischief, and I can handle the constant repetition. (“Lucas, no. Ah ah ah. Mommy said no. Lucas, NO. Lucas! I! Said! NOOOOO!” Lather rinse and repeat about 16 times every hour.) I can handle the tantrums, both his and mine. I can handle the need to anticipate, to intervene, to redirect, to substitute, to divert, and to mollify on a near-constant basis. I can even handle his new favourite game, “Let’s drop stuff like cheerios and Bob the Builder and things I found between the couch cushions into Mommy’s coffee and see if she notices!”

(Although that last one takes a Herculean amount of adorable-ness to counteract, I must admit. Lucky for him, he’s up to the task.)

What I can’t handle? The screech. He’s entered that whining, screeching phase that makes me want to stick knitting needles in my ears. He screeches when he’s vexed. He screeches when he wants something. He screeches because it’s been forty or even fifty seconds since the last time he screeched.

I can handle the chaos. Truth be told, there’s a twisted part of me that might actually like the chaos. The screeching? May well be the thing that finally separates me from my tenous hold on my sanity.

It’s just a phase, right?

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I’ve taken to calling Lucas “Sir Edmund Hillary” because there is nothing that he won’t try to climb. Why? Because it’s there.

I’ve gotten quite laissez-faire about chasing him off the stairs. I don’t rush to take him off the kitchen table any more. (But I do keep the kitchen chairs stacked on the opposite side of the kitchen from the table to discourage him just a bit.) And I’ve completely given up on trying to dissuade him from his “climb onto the end table, over the arm of the couch, crawl or lurch the length of the couch and then roll off the other arm” loop that he’ll happily run five or six times in succession.

We were at the playground yesterday, and he gave me quite the piece of his mind when I pulled him off the ladder (at a height of about five feet) on the big-kids’ play structure. He’s fearless, and relentless. It’s a terrifying combination in a third child!!

But man is he smart! Of course, I’m completely unbiased, but he seems to understand an uncanny amount of instruction for a 16-month old. He will get his own shoes or diaper if you ask him to, and although he hates to be interrupted from his adventures for a diaper change, he will settle down if I explain to him that it will only take a moment for a diaper change and then he can continue playing.

I don’t remember the other boys being so obsessively persistent. He has actually whacked me with a book as I type fiercely on the computer, trying to get something done, when he has decided it’s time for me to read the Busy Little Spider RIGHT NOW. (He’s also tried to push me away from the sink while I was washing dishes and has reached over to pull the camera away from my face. The boy knows his own mind!

My favourite thing about Lucas right now, though, is how he loves his toys. He will sit and play quite happily with any kind of action figure, but he loves Bob the Builder the best. He’s discovered Simon’s superhero figures, though, and it’s rather adorable to hear him say “Ba-Man” and “Spi-Man”. (He doesn’t, mind you, say Tristan or Simon yet, but he’s got his superheros down cold.

And let me tell you, there’s going to be hell to pay if that child says Wolverine before he says Mommy!

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First, I loved your comments on my last post, where I asked you your thoughts about letting my five- and seven-year-old boys walk around the block together alone. For now, we’ve decided to hold off, and I swear it’s not because my mother called me up the night I posted it and more or less told me I was free to support the idea of free range kids but I was not free to subject her grandsons to the philosophy. Well, not entirely because of that, anyway… (*waves to mom*)

So today, let’s talk about what psychological damage I can wreak on her youngest grandson instead. Yep, I want to talk about sleep training. Ah, the controversy never gets old around here.

Lucas is fifteen months old, and for pretty much each night of those fifteen months, he’s been cuddled to sleep. I think it’s time he learned to start falling asleep on his own in his crib. Can someone please flip a magic switch so I can get him to do it immediately, without any stress to him or extraneous effort on my part? No? I didn’t think so.

I’m not opposed to letting him cry it out, if I must. It worked with both Tristan and Simon, although they were each a little less than a year old when we tried it. It took about five nights of fussing with Tristan (you can read my CIO diaries in the archives) and about twice that long with Simon, but in the end, it was soooooo worth it to just be able to put the baby in his crib, kiss him goodnight and walk away.

It’s not that I begrudge Lucas his nightly cuddle, either. I’d still cuddle him before hand, but I still believe that it’s important that they learn to sooth themselves to sleep. He’s not a bad night-time sleeper overall, but he’s been waking in the night a lot lately, and I think he’d be less fussy when he wakes up if he’d put himself to sleep in the first place. A couple of times in the past week, instead of dropping right back to sleep when I re-insert his soother, he’s been wide awake in the crib. He’ll stay in the crib and eventually drift off again, but only if I’m standing there. While I’m pleased with this development, I’m not overly fond of standing stock-still in his room for fifteen minutes at a time in the middle of the night, pining for my bed the whole time. I’m thinking I can somehow parlay this into sleep training, but not quite sure how to do it or if I want to start down that road.

This is, after all, my last baby and I’m coddling him for all he’s worth. As much as I’m a fan of Ferber’s ideas and I totally agree with the theory — I just don’t want to put either of us through it all and in my experience thus far, there’s been no middle ground. It’s either CIO or cuddle to sleep, and I’m not sure either extreme is where I want to go next.

This is where you come in. I don’t particularly want to debate the merits of CIO, and you should know up front that I am deeply offended by Elizabeth Pantley so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t drag her into the conversation, but other than that — what have you found works or doesn’t work in sleep training? How did you get your kids to start falling asleep on their own? How old were they? As with all things mothering, I know I won’t still be rocking him to sleep when he’s on his honeymoon, but even on the third go-round, I’m still not sure how I want to navigate this one. And you know I get all my best mothering material from the bloggy peeps, right?

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I was just settling into the comfy chair with Lucas, preparing for our regular bedtime routine. He’ll nurse for a few minutes and then I’ll cuddle him to sleep – the third child truly is spoiled rotten. I’d just pulled him in close when I realized I’d completely forgotten to give him his after-dinner bottle. (I blame Granny and Papa Lou for their scintillating after-dinner conversation.)

I looked down at him and said, “Oh no! We forgot to give you your bottle! I’m so sorry!” He looked up at me with his beautiful brown eyes and said, “Bottle.” Clear as day! He’s got a dozen or 20 words, but I hadn’t heard that one before. What really shocks me, though, is how much he understands of what we say to him. Unbiased as I am, I truly think he’s ahead of the curve in comprehension.

I laughed and started pulling up my shirt to offer him a boob, figuring even though he’d be down a couple of ounces of milk because we’d skipped the bottle he’d survive and it was too late to bother now. He looked at my breast, looked at me and pointed quite clearly to the shelf in the kitchen where I keep the baby bottles, which we could see from the chair, and said, “Bottle.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing again, “I’ll give you a bottle. But you have to drink a little bit of this first.” The nursing is staggering to a halt, but I’m doing what I can to prolong it. He took about four cursory slurps, popped off the nipple and pointed at the kitchen. “Bottle.”

This is the same child who last summer would pop off the boob randomly to suck on his own toes. It’s a good thing my ego is not fragile, I tell you. Apparently toes and cow’s milk are both preferable to whatever I’m brewing up.

So I brought him into the kitchen, where he giggled in delight as I poured the milk into a bottle. He pointed at the microwave and said, “Bottle!” while it warmed, and proceeded to snarf down all six ounces. For good measure, as I was finally settling in to cuddle him to sleep, he arched his back to look at the empty bottle on the end table where I had placed it.

“Bottle!” he announced, pointing to it and grinning at me with a look of self-satisfaction that clearly said, “I am the cleverest baby who ever lived, and aren’t I devilishly cute, too?”

Somehow, I think I’m going to spend a lot of this child’s lifetime thinking, “It’s a good thing you’re so darn cute…”

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I am finding this particular stage of Lucas’s development exhausting. No, really? EXHAUSTING. Also exasperating, challenging, and frustrating. (And, to be fair, delightful and charming and wonderful.) But mostly, exhausting.

He stubbornly refuses to walk on his own, even though he can stand with no problem, has walked across the room unaided, and can perch himself precariously on a peanut butter jar, presumably to get the jam hidden on a higher shelf in the pantry.

But he can climb up and down an entire flight of stairs, make his way on and off the sofa, and simply cannot resist an opportunity to clamber onto something… chairs, end tables, diaper crates and toy boxes (not to mention, as I said, peanut butter jars.) The good thing is that he really is getting pretty good at getting himself back down again, so if I’m nearby I can at least supervise and let him climb up and down to his heart’s content. This assumes that I am at liberty to stand benevolently nearby for the 16 hours per day he would prefer to engage in his furniture-scaling adventures.

When he isn’t trying to climb every elevated surface within two feet of the floor, he’s dumping stuff. Emptying cupboards of their pots, drawers of their tea-towels, and bookshelves of their books is *almost* as much fun as climbing into the cupboard and drawers and onto the now-empty bookshelves.

In the 10 minutes it takes to make sandwiches for lunch, he can create a mess that takes me 20 minutes to clean up. I pick up the books, he dumps the plastic plates and cups from the cupboard. I pick up the plastic plates and cups, he ransacks the shoe closet. I rearrange the shoes, he dumps the books off the book shelf. I found the TV remote in the dog’s food bowl yesterday and he unfolded an entire basket of folded laundry in the time it took me to answer a telephone call.

Did I mention exhausting?

At the end of a long day, I look at Tristan and Simon and think, “They survived — and I survived them. Surely this phase doesn’t last forever.” It just seems particularly taxing, not to mention early, to be struggling with this at only 14 months. It’s a good thing he’s so darn adorable, I tell him frequently. Only the cutest babies get away with that kind of ongoing mischief without finding themselves packed up and shipped off to Granny’s house!

It’s hard not to indulge this kind of cuteness. But please tell me that this phase is a short one! The toddler years are not yet upon us and I’m already running out of reserve energy!!

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This third child will be the one that does all the frightful things that the first two never did, won’t he? Now that poor old mom is too worn down to properly fight back.

Standing on the peanut butter jar (!) so he can reach deeper into the pantry. He’s all of 14 months old and can’t even WALK yet, for goodness sake!!

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So he doesn’t walk and he barely talks, but Lucas does a wicked Darth Vader impression:

I’m sure Lucas’s affinity to Darth Vader has nothing to do with Beloved’s habit of saying, “Luke, I am your father.”

(This was filmed on a Flip video camera, circulated by the Motherhood as part of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Flip project. Fun!)

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Baby’s first smile, first laugh. The first time baby slept through the night. Baby’s first food, and the first meal baby feeds to himself. Baby’s first tentative steps, and baby’s first words. All milestones worthy of marking on the calendar, of noting, of celebrating.

And now, finally, after a YEAR of waiting — baby’s first favourite TV show. Actually, the first time the baby shows even the remotest interest in TV in general.

Yah, yah, I know. Both the Canadian and the American pediatric societies recommend against television for babies. Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies don’t have full-time jobs and two other kids to take care of? Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies LIKE to try going to the bathroom while diverting the baby from a rousing game of lick-the-toiletbrush? Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies are eating a whole lot of takeout food?

It’s no secret we’re TV junkies at my place, and Tristan and Simon both loved the flickering electric nipple from an early age. We have more than a dozen Baby Einstein videos and DVDs, not to mention countless others: Bob the Builder, the Wiggles, and enough Thomas the Tank Engine to choke a conductor. And yet, despite our best efforts to ensnare him, the baby has steadfastly refused to be engaged by the idiot box. Perhaps because it is *always* on, he’d no more stare at it than at the sofa, or the vacuum cleaner. (You’d leave yours out, too, if you were using it ten times a week!)

But! Oh happy day, we have finally found a television program that captivates Lucas. And not only that, but he’s showing a remarkable amount of discernment in his first choice of favourite TV show. No whiney Caillou for my boy, nor pedantic Barney. No lispy ducks, no freakish blobs, no little blue doggies to endure. Nope, this is TV I myself could, and will, and DO watch happily for hours, and DVDs that are well worth investing in.

You know what show captivates Lucas? You haven’t seen from cute until you’ve seen him wiggling his little happy dance to its iconic theme.

Lucas loves the Muppet Show. Glory be.

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Playing with Flickr’s (relatively) new video sharing option. Aren’t baby laughs the best?

(Lucas and I had just picked up Tristan from a birthday party when we discovered that balloons are the funniest. thing. ever! The boys were laughing so hard I had to get out of the van and catch it on video.)

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This is what happens at the intersection of “Oh crap, I need to take a photo today!” and “Oh crap, how am I ever going to get enough people to vote to send me to BlogHer?”

How could you deny this cutie? If you haven’t already, pleasevote for me!!!!

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My darling baby Lucas,

Has it only been a year you have been in our lives? Has it already been a year? How can both of those things seem so surprising at the same time?

You, my third son, my beautiful baby boy, are one year old today. I don’t have the words to tell you how much you are loved, and how much love you have given to us in just one short year.

Lucas, you are a delightful baby. You find new ways to charm me, and new ways to vex me, every single day. You are not quite walking yet, although I’m sure you could if you just let yourself try. You crawl at the speed of light, though, and you cruise the furniture while making delighted little caws of accomplishment. “Look at me go!” your bright face and happy chirps are clearly saying.

And go you do. We call you a menace, several times a day, because you do not miss a single opportunity to find mischief. With a hundred toys to choose from, you’ll find the one with the not-baby-safe parts and then refuse to give it up without a fight. With an entire house to play in, you have an impeccable sense of when a door is left open, a baby gate ajar, a cup of coffee momentarily abandoned within your reach.

Speaking of coffee, one of your cutest little “tricks” at this age has come very close to making me spew many mouthsful of coffee down my shirt, but I’ve finally come to anticipate it and not snort with laughter every time you do it. Some time in the last month, you took to letting out a satisfied, “Ahhhhh” every time you saw me take a deep drink from my cup of coffee. Given the amount of coffee I’ve drank lately, you’ve had plenty of time to hone this particular trick! Clever thing that you are, as soon as you realized it made us laugh, you took to smacking out the same satisfied “Ahhhh!” any time anybody takes a drink of anything in your presence. It’s such an odd little trick, but endlessly entertaining to your entire family!

You are an impressive mimic. For months now, you have delighted us with your babbling, which sound uncannily like real words. When we sing “your song”, which is a play on BNL’s “La la la Lemon” that goes “La la la Lukey-fish” you love to join in on the la-la-la chorus. You also happily sing along to your other song, Great Big Sea’s Lukey. We can often coerce you out of a foul mood with a few bellowed verses of either song, and when you sing along with us it simply melts my heart.

You have an impressive set of lungs, too, and have learned that nothing will get you what you want quicker than an ear-splitting screech. Your favourite time to employ this tactic, aside from when we are sitting down to dinner and there is the possibility that you may soon not have an adequate supply of food in front of you, is when we are in a public place that calls for a certain amount of vocal restraint. Passers-by still seem to find you uncommonly adorable, though, and you’ve had more than your share of cooing strangers everywhere we go.

Once upon a time, you slept like a dream at night. We’ve dropped that particular thread in the past few months, but you seem to have traded excellent nighttime sleep for more reasonable daytime naps. I’m still not sure I’m happy with this trade! In the last month or so you so completely wore me down that I’ve now capitulated entirely to your will, and it’s a rare night that you don’t spend at least a couple of hours sleeping in my bed with me. With you, my third child, I’ve finally realized that it’s okay for principles to melt run like spring runoff in the face of sleep deprivation.

At the age of one, you are easily delighted. Finding a brother taking a bath seems to be particularly delightful, based on your happy chirps. Having a brother pay any sort of playful attention to you at all is another daily delight, as is playing tickle and tumble with Daddy or me. You love the “One Baby” series of books, to make “vroom” noises while pushing toy trucks, and the mouse on the computer that you aren’t supposed to touch.

I could go on for hours, my sweet baby Lucas, listing the ways in which you bring love and laughter and joy into our lives. Not to mention a few more grey hairs and wrinkles than I had this time last year! But let me finish with this simple wish: may your whole life be filled with the same delightful charm and exhuberance that is you at the age of one. Happy Birthday, my love!

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