Dear Ladybug,
On Tuesday you turned thirty-eight months old, and on Friday you celebrated this fact by graduating from pre-school!
Well, you “graduated” only in the sense that you wore a mortarboard and were given a coiled sheet of paper with the word Diploma scrawled across the top of it in an appropriately Gothic font; you’re still going back to preschool next year… and, in fact, next Tuesday as well. Nevertheless, it was a fun bit of pomp and circumstances that served to remind me just one more time this month about just how much of a grown-up little girl you are.
And grown up you have! You are now an almost entirely self sufficient child, and the sudden of it both amazes and horrifies me. On the one hand, I marvel at how quickly you’ve learned to do things, and willing you are to take responsibility for more and more tasks. On the other hand, every new task to take over from me just reminds me how frickin’ old I’m getting. It seems like yesterday you were just a little baby and now you’re a girl. At this rate, tomorrow you’re going to be 16 and I’m going to over-the-hill, and by the end of the week you’re going to be my age and I’m going to be dead.
It’s bizarre how sudden this transformation seems, at least to me. It’s not like I you’ve suddenly become fiercely independent. I mean, you have, but I’ve said that about you since month 18. Neither can I say that you’ve suddenly started to demand “I can do it!” about everything: you’ve done that since month 29; in fact, in month 33 you started to adding “…all by myself!” to it. It’s not even like you haven’t been able to do things for yourself by yourself up till now: you’ve more or less completely chosen your outfits and dressed yourself for the past two months. Clearly, you’ve been working towards self-sufficiency for a while now.
No, I think the thing that marks this month in particular is just how many tasks you’ve elected to handle for yourself. For example, for thirty-seven months now, we’ve started the day the exact same way: you wake up, you get me up, and together we make you a warm milk, cuddle up on the couch for some Playhouse Disney, and then get dressed. But this month you’ve changed the game plan: now when you get up, you simply get out of your pajamas, choose an outfit, get dressed (which often includes color coordinating hair clips, rings, and/or bracelets), go to the potty, and then fire yourself up a DVD until I get up. (You haven’t yet figured out how to get the remote to go to the Disney Channel, although you’re working on it.)
At the other end of the spectrum, for thirty-seven months, we’ve ended the day in much the same way: as 9 o’clock draws near, we head off to the bathtub to scrub you clean (a tumultuous process in which I attempted to use as much of the bath water as possible to clean your body and hair before you managed to transfer it from within the bathtub to its immediate surroundings, including, but not limited to, the walls, the window, the mirror, the floor, and your father ) followed by tag-team-teeth-brushing (I load toothpaste and swishing water; you brush, swish, and spit). Now, however, you’re content to fill the bath and clean yourself off all by yourself; moreover, you’ve mastered the dual arts of toothpastery and toothbrushery, effectively eliminating the need to have me around at night at all. In fact, whenever I do stick my head in to monitor your progress, you roll your eyes with a huff followed by a mildly irritated “I can do it myself, dad. I’ll call you if I need something, okay?” Holy crap, when did you turn into a teenager?
You can also get into my car and secure yourself in the car seat, load and operate the dishwasher and the robot vacuum, even empty and reload garbage bags in the kitchen trash bins. But in addition to just being able to do your own chores, you’ve also developed what I find to be an unhealthy fascination with work. You’ll often announce “I need to do some work,” whereupon you’ll take your backpack and your Elmo computer downstairs to the office room, sit down at the desk, and bang away at the keyboard for up to ten minutes. Eventually, you’ll put the keyboard back, walk out of the office, and walk back up to your mom and I to announce “I’m finished with my work now” before going on to play with your dolls or blocks or whatever. I was a little panicked by this, as I didn’t want you spending the golden years of your childhood pretending to be a cubicle drone, so imagine my despair when one day you announced that you couldn’t play, because you had to pay the bills. At first your mom and I tried to convince you that, being 3 years old, you really didn’t have any bills to pay, but you were undeterred. Eventually, I wrote you up a invoice for “extreme silliness” and charged you 37 cents for it. We then went to your piggy bank, took out a quarter, two nickels, and two pennies; we wrapped these coins in the invoice and stuffed them into an envelope; we then affixed a stamp, put your name on the address, and stuck it in the mailbox.
A minute later, you decided that you’d had enough of playing “bills” and asked to have your money back, at which point I explained that (a) a bill means you give your money away so that you don’t get it back, and (b) once it was inside the mailbox it was gone. You reflected on this for a good minute before announcing “I don’t want to pay the bills anymore.” And thankfully, you haven’t.
Of course, you also got a healthy dose of “real life” at the end of April as well — you had some pretty nasty oral surgery done to you. It turns out that your first trip to the dentist last month revealed that what we can only assume was your nonexistent prenatal care in China resulted in the under-development of your molars. Imagine that termites were attracted to tooth enamel rather than wood pulp, and you’d have a pretty good idea of what your molars looked like. Oddly enough, though, you were excited as hell for the surgery, mostly because the dentist said that you got to go there wearing your Tinker Bell pajamas, and that you could bring your favorite toy with you. Pajamas? In public? Awesome!
The surgery itself was very quick — they knocked you out with sleeping gas, and within 45 minutes they’d covered up your three of your molars with silver caps and plugged the holes in the fourth. For the most part you bounced back pretty quick from the surgery, with your only major complaints being that (a) your silver teeth were too big for your mouth and (b) the dentist specifically forbade Laffy Taffy and, dear God, was there any reason to live anymore? Thankfully for you, after a week your silver teeth apparently shrunk to the correct size and the dentist allowed Laffy Taffy in small bits, and all was good with the universe again.
You’ve also developed a much more adult appreciation of going for a walk. In previous months, when you’d come up to me and ask “Hey dad, do you want to go for a walk or something?”, what you really meant was “Hey dad! I want to go to the park, and I think it’d be fun to do that in the stroller or the wagon and have you push or pull me there respectively, which technically constitutes going for a walk as at least one of us, viz. you, will be walking.” So imagine my surprise when this month when, after you asked “to go for a walk or something,” you and I actually went for a walk, hand-in-hand strolling down the neighborhood. That you still chose a path that lead to the park is irrelevant! You actually wanted to go for a walk!
In fact, you and I have gone for a walk most afternoons this week, and I must say I quite enjoy these times with you. Many times we just walk, with you chattering away about, well, anything while I do my best to follow along. Other times you like to play with nature — chasing rabbits and squirrels across the grass, blowing the achenes off of dandelions, or watching robins dig up worms. Sometimes we sing as we walk, although you’ve gotten past the boring phase of simply singing the songs as they’re written; now you’ve discovered that almost any tune can be made infinitely more fun to sing by adding the pair of words “butt” and “toot” in just the right place, as in
Twinkle, twinkle, little butt
How I wonder what you toot?
or
It starts in my toes and I crinkle my butt,
Wherever it goes, I always toot.
and so forth. On a related note, your mother wants to remove you from preschool and send you away to a convent.)
Frequently you like to turn the walk into a game. Tag, specifically. You’re fond of taunting me with “You can’t catch me!” before sprinting away in what I can only describe as the only run sanction by the Ministry of Silly Walks: arms flailing to each side, legs swiveling about at angles orthogonal to the ground, and your head invariably pointing in any direction other than the one you’re running. On walks, this usually means you get four or five steps away before you trip on an unexpected bit of minutia, such as a even crack in the sidewalk or, say, the side of a house. Unfortunately, you’ve also taken to playing this when you climb the stairs in the house, which is silly on two counts: first, your inability to look where you run means you invariably trip going up the stairs; second, the act of you then falling down the stairs means I manage to catch you without even moving.
Most recently, however, you’ve become a fan of taking yourself for a walk, or rather, taking your little dolly (who you named after yourself) for a walk. You’ll announce that, for example, you need to take Little Ladybug to, variously, “school” or “work” or “Belgium.” You’ll then pack yourself a backpack for the excursion, tossing in essentials such as a pair of socks, panties, a shirt and shorts, a book, a smallish pillow, a plastic cup of Legos, and a blanket, after which you’ll pack a second bag filled with the exact same things for Little Ladybug. You then drape these bags on either side of your toy stroller, lock in your dolly, and then dress yourself for the trip, invariably matching a floppy hat and rain galoshes with a fancy princess dress on the grounds that you just never know what the weather might bring sun, rain, or a formal gala. Of course, the end result is that you look like a diminutive bag lady, albeit one that suggests “cute” a lot more than “crazy,” although not by much.
Fortunately for me, for all the ways you seem to have grown up this month, the one chore you haven’t wanted to take over for yourself is going to bed. Each night you and I cuddle up on the couch downstairs and watch the nightly episode of Yo! Gabba Gabba!, after which we head upstairs to your room. Usually we read a story or two (or five) before we climb into bed. We cover you up with your covers, always making sure that the last one is your purple blankie with your name embroidered in the corner, placed so that you can feel it under your left hand as you lay down. Then we sing a song or two (or five) from a selection of Disney classics, Wiggles tunes, and (more recently) early selections from They Might be Giants. Finally, we exchange a hug and a kiss and a tickle and any number of giggles, eventually ending with a “Good night, Daddy” followed with an “I love you.”
And you know, my little lady… I love you too!
— Ba ba
Photo album
See more pictures from your thirty-eighth month over at Flickr.
