Dear Ladybug,
On Thursday you turned thirty-six months old. The big “three–oh”… minus the “oh” bit. To celebrate, we surprised you today with a secret trip to that toddler version of paradise on Earth, Chuck E. Cheese. Your first exposure to the place was on your second birthday just a year ago, but it very quickly moved to the top of places to which you want to go, just above “the park” and just below “free candy sample expo.” In your usual form, you blew endless tokens taking pretend car rides with over-sized rodents and playing skee-ball, collecting several thousands of tickets that only had enough purchasing power to get you a Tootsie Pop and a tube of lip balm.
In fact, we actually told you we were going to the “Teeter-Totter Park,” a park that, being on the far west side of town, is on to which we travel that frequently. As a carrot to dangle before you, it worked great: you managed to go from slightly sleepy girl in PJs to fully bathed, brushed, and dressed so quickly you nearly red-shifted out of sight. As we drove to Chuck E Cheese, you repeatedly commented that “This was not the correct route to the Teeter-Totter Park” and “We need to turn here for the Teeter-Totter Park” and “Do you even know where the Teeter-Totter Park is?” until we finally pulled into the parking lot of the pizzeria. Even then, you were momentarily puzzled, citing that “This is Chuck E. Cheese, not the Teeter-Totter Park” before it dawned on you that perhaps you had been mislead.
I only bring this story up to point out that after several hours at Chuck E. Cheese — followed by a few more hours at the Eric Carle 40th Anniversary shindig at Borders — we finally took you home, where you passed out into a deep, happy slumber. When you awoke several hours later, you groggily made your way downstairs to sit with me on the couch, whereupon you gave me a big hug, smiled, and said “So when are we going to the Teeter-Totter Park?”
Your mother actually has your official birthday party planned for next week, a Princess Party in which several of your friends will descend upon my home dressed as Disney princesses to play party games, make tiaras, eat cake, and exchange books, like some sort of extra cute invasion by Huns/Oprah’s Book Club. Given that you still spend a couple hours each day dressed as either Cinderella or Tinker Bell, you are beside yourself with excitement. (In fact, the only way you could be more excited is if you could actually split and be literally beside yourself, so that you could be dressed as both simultaneously, like some kind of cross-dressing Schrodinger’s cat.)
Last year we had postponed your birthday party largely on account of guilt-ridden poor planning, but this year the reasoning was much more deliberate: you have three sets of grandparents, and they do a fine job of smothering you with gifts in an extremely timely manner. Among this year’s stash of nana-induced goodies are new ladybug-themed gardening equipment, a giant ladybug pillow/blanket/nap-pad, and a hypochondriac unicorn.
You also got some very pretty dresses, including a pink polka-dotted one that twirls ever-so-prettily when you spin. As a result, it has become you go-to Mamma Mia! dress, and the wearing of it is required dress for movie viewings. In case you haven’t been keeping track, this means that you cannot bear to watch the movie without:
- Your pretty new dress, which works for any number of dance numbers,
- A small book, which is used as a prop in “Honey honey,”
- A tutu, which is needed as a prop in “Dancing queen,”
- Sparkly shoes, which are needed for “Voulez-vous,”
- A small, frilly blanket, needed as a prop in “Winner takes it all,”
- A burst water main, required for the final scene.
Given all the prep work you need to change costumes and spastically reproduce the dance numbers, even though we play the Mama Mia! DVD on a daily basis, I don’t think you actually have time to watch it anymore.
Your coolest birthday present, hands down, is the Disney Princess bicycle. Your first reaction to it was unbridled joy, for it was as if your grandparents truly understood the Ladybuggian worldview that all things are better when they’ve got Disney Princesses on them. Of course, your initial joy was tempered at bit after your first few attempts to ride it, during which you were irritatingly disappointed that the bike didn’t simply go at your command.
It turns out that that bike riding involves the mastery of two separate, but equally important tasks: pedaling and steering. While you’ve pretty much mastered the art of steering, pedaling has been more of a headache. I first tried to explain the expected motion of the pedals to you, being careful to avoid the term “cyclic” on the grounds that such descriptions might be self-referential, and I’d rather not have your bike riding lessons marred on the outset of logical paradoxes. I then tried to move your legs around and around on the petals as you sat. Unfortunately, while you get the concept that you must alternately push each leg, you still think that you do so on an apparently arbitrary pace, resulting in you actually backpedaling half the time. Hence, your typical biking lesson involves making the bike lurch forward a few inches before grinding to a halt, repeated over and over again, which, despite being frustrating as hell for you, I find to be an excellent preparation for your eventual driving lessons.
In fact, you being sixteen doesn’t seem that far off anymore. For example, you’re in preschool now, having moved there from “2-to-4-Year-Old Room.” Apparently the combination of your being potty-trained, fully conversant, well-behaved, and cute as a button were sufficient for your promotion, together with one of your friends, a little blond-haired girl named Lily. As a result, much of this month has been spent at daycare “transitioning” you two, which to me sounds more like you’re shifting to another state of matter than moving to a new classroom. In any case what with the increased outdoor playtime and more elaborate art projects given the preschoolers, you’ve increased your ability to make a mess of yourself exponentially, a fact that is paradoxically your most and my least favorite facts about it.
A careful re-reading of that last paragraph — particularly, the “2-to-4-year-old” bit — means you’ve actually entered preschool a full year earlier than one might expect. Pre. School. Geez… you’re not even in elementary school and you’re already skipping grades. You’ve got nerd written all over you, little girl. Just wait till all your friends find out your parents are math teachers to boot… you won’t get a date till you’re 30. Which is just fine by me, come to think of it…
Sadly, I think I’m hoping to much. In addition to being brainy and mature, you’re also Grade A fashion plate. You’ve completely taken over the task of dressing yourself, from the selection of clothes to the girding them upon your body.* You’ve got a particular eye for color coordination, and you simply will not where, say, a pair of socks or polytail clip, unless it complements the overall chromatic character of your current couture. For example, whilst at the Shoo Ranch this month, you spent the first few nights — the ones with subzero temperatures — a shivering wreck because you would not where any socks to cover your feet, since none of the pairs we packed actually matched your pajamas. Yes — you would rather die a horrible death by hypothermia than clash, a survival skill that, while almost certainly meeting the approval of Tyra Banks and Tyso Beckford, would make Darwin weep.
* The relationship between your feet and your clothes is significantly interesting. On the one hand, you’ve developed a comical obsession with making sure the toe-ridge of your sock — the little line of stitching at the toe-end — is perfect aligned with the front of your foot, so that it smoothly rests across the tops of your toes. When it is not precisely positioned, you have a slight breakdown that a casual observer might misinterpret the reaction to, say, impending nuclear holocaust, before yanking off the sock and trying again. In contrast to the military precision with which you attire yourselves in socks, your approach to shoes is, well, somewhat less thorough: you frequently cram your feet into your shoes without, say, moving the tongue out of the way or unfastening the Velcro straps or, indeed, even finding the correct feet.
Actually, the two previous paragraphs go a long way towards explaining your infatuation with being barefoot all the time.
You’ve also gotten a lot more expressive in your speaking. I know, I know: I say that every month, it seems. Yes, I’ve written at length about your blossoming vocabulary and your propensity to talk and talk and talk and talk and not stop until you pass out from minor asphyxiation. But whereas before you might simply recap (at length) the events of the day, you’ve now added had gestures and vocal inflections and any number of adjectives to spice things up. For example, whereas before you might express your surprise at something with, say, wide-eyed astonishment and a gasp, now you say “Oh. My. Gosh.” like a vacuous Valley Girl. As another example, should something go wrong your previous response would have been the generic “Sorry Daddy,” whereas now I get the more nuanced sections of:
- “Sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.” if you know I know you are at fault,
- “Sorry, Daddy. These things happen.” if you know you are at fault, but are unsure if I know it, and
- “Sorry, Daddy. I didn’t have anything to do with it.” if it’s totally your fault and you know I don’t know it yet.
You have quite a future in trial litigation, little girl.
Sometimes I wonder just where you pick things up. For example, the Queen B usually enjoys watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! as part of her post-middle-school-decompression process. Whereas you like the former show*, you’ve made it clear over and over again that you do not like Jeopardy!. Your previous tactics ranged from “I don’t like this show” and “Please change this show” to full-on tantrums demanding its cancellation from the broadcast lineup of the entire Western United States, to no avail. Finally, the other night as Jeopardy! started, you simply got off the couch and started heading to your room.
“Where are you going” I asked.
“To play in my room. Wanna come play with me?”
“What about watching Jeopardy!?”
“Eh,” You said with a shrug. “I’m not much of a fan,” and went to your room.
Once I finally stopped laughing, I clicked off the show and went to play dollies with you in your room.**
* I cannot for the life of me determine what you find appealing about Wheel of Fortune, except that it involves people shouting letters, and what with your move to preschool (see below), you’re all into letters. Or rather, you’re into the concept of letters and, in particular, their standard lexicographical ordering. (That is, you like to sing the ABCs.) However, the only letter you actually care about is the letter L: it’s the only one you can (or in fact care to) consistently recognize. In fact, given your name, you view the letter L with some degree of propriety, which means that any time someone on Wheel calls it out, you get snippy: “Hey! That’s my letter!”
** Oddly enough, in the past few days you have become a bit of a Jeopardy!, not so much because you like the show in any form, but rather because you noticed that the final bit of the “Final Jeopardy” theme music sounds just like the final bit of “I’m a Little Teapot:” Tip… me over and pour me out. Bum! Bum! I’d never noticed it prior to you mentioning it, but a quick search on “teh internets” confirmed that that was not a coincidence. In any case, nowadays you can bring yourself to patiently sit through the show to make it to Final Jeopardy, at which point we both sing:
La la la la-la la la laaaaa…
La la la la la…. la-la-la-la-la
La la la la-la la la la laaa….
Tip me over and pour me out!over and over again, shouting the teapot bit at the top of our lungs, a la “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.”
Of course, even though your loquaciousness grows by leaps and bounds each day, you’ve still got a number of endearing little grammatical glitches that serve, if nothing else, to remind me that you’re still a teeny-tiny little girl. For example, you still have trouble with a pronouncing a few sounds, most notably l, which you pronounce as as a w; k, which you pronounce as a t; and g, which you pronounce as a d. I’ve grown accustomed to this (and, in fact, am still charmed by it), but it does lead to my having to frequently correct people that you name is not, in fact, Wadybud Tompwetsify.
You also have significant trouble connecting the correct pronoun with the correct conjugation of a verb, a typical example being the follow (true) exchange of dialog: “Wow Ladybug, you speak very well.” “Yes, I are.” Just like the aforementioned mispronunciations, I chalk these up as the laughably dismissible snafus of a three-year-old, but your mother (who, admittedly, deals on a daily basis with slack-jaws tweens incapable of finding a complete sentence with two hands and a flashlight) is somewhat more concerned, and she always takes to the time to try and help correct them. Of course, the results usually end up like this:
You: Okay Mommy. I is going to take a bath now.
She: No, Ladybug. You are going to bath now.
You: oh. Sorry. I are going to take a bath now.
She: Oops, no, no… You need to say “I am going to bath now.”
You: You am going to take a bath?
She: No, I’m not taking a bath. You are taking a bath…
You: I are?
She: Aaaagghh!
You: Sorry, Mommy. These things happen.
You’ve also become particularly aware of other people’s feelings. You will very frequently start up conversations with the direct query “Are you sad?” or “Are you happy?” or “Are you mad?” or other questions in a similar vein. I was initially amazed at your concern for other people’s well-being at all, given that the defining characteristic of the “Terrible Twos” — of which I am informed you are in the middle — is utter self-centeredness. But what’s amazed me more over the past month is first the degree of accuracy with which you assess others’ feelings, and then what you do to in response. For example, if I am sad, you’ll offer me a sympathetic “It’s okay” and give me a hug and kiss; if I am mad, you’ll offer an “I’m sorry” and give me a hug and kiss; and if I am happy, you’ll smile a glorious smile, and hit me up for some candy or a soda.
Yeah… you’re a piece of work. And I love you for it.
Happy Birthday, Ladybug.
— Ba ba
Photo album
See more pictures from your thirty-sixth month over at Flickr.
