Category: Lucas

My dear, sweet Lucas, today you are six! years! old!

Sweet Lucas, you are an adorable kid. You are warm and affectionate and love to share kisses and hugs, not only with your mom and dad, but grandparents and teachers, too. You draw beautiful artwork woven with expressions of “I love you mom” written right into them. I secretly hope you never grow out of the practice!

You are a smart, curious boy, Lucas. You ask intriguing questions out of the blue that give me an occasional glimpse into your busy mind. “How do you stick the light to the ceiling?” and “Where does the snow go?” and “How do you see only one thing if you have two eyes?” and my favourite, “Where does the water in your mouth come from?” You are unique among your brothers for both the sheer number and the startling complexity of your inquiries.

Ah, your brothers. It’s not easy being the third of three boys, but you have found many ways to cope. You will repeat yourself, never escalating your tone or volume, again and again until you are acknowledged to your satisfaction. Being the youngest leaves you in the precarious position of being both wise beyond your years and “the baby” in everyone’s eyes except your own. You’ll forgive me if I hold on to your sweet babyness for just a little while longer, won’t you?

You started school full days this year, even though you are still in kindergarten. I struggled for quite a while with the idea that you were too advanced for a mixed kindergarten class, and wanted to skip you ahead to Grade 1 this past fall. While I think we made the right decision, I still wonder if you weren’t more than ready for Gr 1 even now. You can read quite well now, recognizing many sight words and sounding out many more complex ones. You can count well past 100 in English and know all your colours and the seasons in French. In fact, I worried you were a little bored in school before the Christmas break, as you became quite resistant to going, but the lure of seeing your best buddies seems to be winning you over again. I still miss your company on my Wednesdays off, though!

You are a boy who knows what he likes. Currently, your favourite things are peanut butter, just about any fruit, breakfast for dinner, animals (especially dogs and cats, but you were recently charmed by a hedgehog and you love to browse at the pet store), Minecraft, daddy’s iPad, Playdough, dinosaurs, your Imaginext playsets, Lego, Hexbugs, and anything involving arts or crafts. And video games, of course.

You are still best friends with Owen. In fact, since you two are joined at the hip and even share the same birthday, you’ll be hosting a joint super-hero birthday party this year! Your other friends are Cole and Darrien and Hudson and Matthew and Dante. You are sweetly oblivious to the names of most of the kids in your class, especially the female ones, but you do profess great affection for Mme Spicer, Mrs Innis and Miss Cheryl.

Oh my Lucas, how you can draw! You surprise me every day with your creatitity and your ability. Your talent is far beyond your years, and I am truly amazed by your drawings, not to mention the copious amounts of them. Oh the trees we have killed! How many six year olds know about primary and complementary colours, and the ROYGBIV order of the colours in the rainbow? Not only do you love to draw but you are startlingly sophisticated in your creativity.

You love your bedtime stories, Lucas. We have recently graduated from board books and simple storybooks to chapter books, and we are currently working our way through Charlotte’s Web. You also love the National Geographic Kids books that Daddy brings home from the library – books about everything from stars and planets to meerkats to dinosaurs, and you and Daddy have discovered the fun of iPad digital books this year. Your preferences are wide-ranging and ecclectic!

We tried to enroll you in skating lessons this past fall, but you were so miserable that we pulled you out after a few weeks. On the other hand, you adore your springtime swim lessons and one of your favourite places in the world is the Manotick pool during the summer. Although the pool closed for the season on Labour Day weekend, you asked regularly if we could go back until there was snow on the ground.

Another huge event in your life this year was the arrival of Bella. It was you who seemed most affected by her arrival – you were the easiest for her to catch and nip as a puppy, and your toys were the ones she found and chewed, and you are the only one not tall enough to step over the baby gates that still, to my lasting annoyance, bar the stairs and your room from her. I think it was safe to say that you did not love having a puppy in the house, but you do love her now. Every night, the two of you charge up and down the hallway together, and you’ve learned that if you give her a toy to carry, she doesn’t try to catch your pajamas with her teeth as you play. It’s sweet to see how much she obviously loves you and your brothers, despite the fact that you might occasionally forget to be gentle with each other.

Lucas, I could go on for pages telling you how much joy you bring to our lives. You are a delightfully affectionate, clever, sweet boy. You charm us, you delight us, and you make us laugh. You’re a wonderful companion and a talented artist and you hold your own ground impressively against two older brothers.

Happy sixth birthday, my adorable Lucas. We love you!!

My sweet baby Lucas, you are FIVE years old today!

Lucas, you are growing up waaaaaay too quickly. Not only are you five years old, but you are a clever and advanced for five, so much so that sometimes we forget you’re still wee. And I know for a fact you think you’re a peer to your older brothers, age-gap be damned.

Lucas, you are a sweet, loving and independent fellow who knows his own mind. Your two favourite things are drawing and jigsaw puzzles, although you like crafts, playdough and video games a lot, too. You go through reams of paper each week, drawing Sonic and puffles and creepers and Willie the cat and whatever else catches your creative fancy. You’re just learning your letters, so what was an independent act is now a joint effort as we spell and you write your captions carefully (and often backwards).

You are half way through your first year at school and you seem to love it. You especially love your teachers, and are disconcerted when there’s a substitute in the classroom. Your mates are Cole and Logan and Rachel and Owen, but your best friend seems to be Meg from daycare. You are impatiently counting the days until full-day kindergarten next year, when you get to go to school all day long like your big brothers, but I love our Wednesday afternoons together and I will deeply miss them when you’re at school all day. You’re a great companion on our afternoon errands, and I am so grateful for the time we have been able to spend together.

This year, you will have your first big-boy birthday party at A Gym Tale – a little bit delayed, but you’ve showed your usual patience with even that. You are very excited about the super-hero theme, and have said that for your birthday dinner today you want your favourite meal: breakfast with bacon and eggs, toast and homefries, and a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and colourful letters on it.

You love music and listening to songs on the iPod. You also love games, online and off, and hold your own playing Uno and Yahtzee and Catan Junior with the family. You don’t have much patience for being babied anymore, even though you still have one foot firmly in preschooler land. Thankfully, you still love Max and Ruby, for example, and Bubble Guppies and Toopy and Binoo, and you still play happily in with your toys in an imaginative world of your own making.

You love the library and books of all sorts. This year, we’ve enjoyed discovering the world of Mr Putter and Tabby, and Henry and Mudge, and a slew of Robert Munsch books. And to my amazement, you’ve lately started reading to ME at night, carefully sounding out the words in the first books of the BOB series of books for beginning readers.

Of all the boys, I think you loved our cruise this past fall the best. Six months later, you still mention it randomly and out of the blue every now and then: “I miss the boat Mommy. When can we go on another cruise?” You also very much miss our “Manotick pool” this long winter, but after October or November you at least stopped asking about it weekly. You also started swimming lessons this year, and of course you loved them.

You are a sweet and loveable boy, Lucas. You are generous with your hugs and kisses, and you seem to be slowly overcoming your deep shyness with strangers. You battle fiercely with your brothers on occasion, especially Simon, and you are a relentless snitch! You are also loquacious and imaginative, and have a wonderful appreciation for a good knock-knock joke.

My sweet Lucas, you bring joy and sunshine into our lives every single day. I still can’t quite believe you’re not a toddler in diapers any more – wasn’t that just yesterday? You’re growing into a fine young boy and we are very proud of you.

Happy birthday, my darling Lucas!! We love you!

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. 🙂

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.)

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!