Category: Ah, me boys

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.

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…