To Calvin, who is four years old today

Four years old. I asked you this morning what is different now that you are four, or what can you do now that you are four that you couldn't when you were only three? "Well, I can play the piano" you answered, and then you proceeded alternately to ponder and to list all the new things about your life; you can reach the bathroom sinks and the washer with the short stool, you can write you're name and Gram's name, you can feed the pets without any help, you sleep in bed with no guard rail, and now your car seat is facing forward in the car. This was your short summary of the past year of your life—your sum of your own accomplishments—but the conversation itself was the measuring stick I really wanted. A year ago you were already an articulate and ready speaker, and the year of development has only strengthened that trait in you so that our conversation this morning was a real treat, as are our conversations most any time.

It was especially interesting to me the items with which you chose to mark your progress—the things that allow you more personal freedom, and the things that feel like real grown-up accomplishments to you, but none of the more general milestones, like running longer distances (almost a mile!), being able to kick and throw balls well, or finally being able to climb the bars at the park on your own. I figure that some of your filtering was temporal; it's not likely you remember that it was a month after you turned three when you (of your own choice and volition) swore off wearing diapers, but since we only just turned your car seat around last week it's that which stands out vividly in your mind. And perhaps you don't remember that you once drew and painted only in scribbles and blobs, and then one day last December I found real faces with stick bodies,which you promptly identified as ("of course") garbage men, hiding in one of your pictures. I'm absolutely certain that it seems to you as though you've always sung on key, though it was just over the past year that you have developed the ability so that others agree with you much of the time. Maybe most notably this is the year you started to learn to read, though I don’t think you see that as a milestone reached yet. First you recognized the letters, then you could write your own name, and shortly after you declared that it was time learn to read, so you did. You started with short phonics books of few words, but it is clear that you are on the verge of a major breakthrough.

These are some of the things with which I choose to mark your year of growth and maturing, but none of them is so precious to me as your new forms of communicating love; It is only in the past year that you have begun to say "I love you" or to throw your arms around one of us or kiss us with your own spontaneity true feeling. Nor are any of your milestones as rewarding to us as parents as your ever burgeoning interest in exploring and discovering both the physical and the metaphysical world. It was two years ago that "why?" first entered your vocabulary in a rather demanding way, and you have exercised that question with increasing insistence ever since. In response to your questioning attitude we have tried to expand your horizons and the world you have to explore; we have added books to your collection, allowed some very limited computer or TV time (you love building train tracks on the computer or watching the Plant Earth documentary on TV), taken you to new places (this week we embark on your first memorable cross country visit) and offered new entertainments, and expanded our own theories of the proper amount of information to include in any answer we give you.

Over the past year you have pushed us to expand our own horizons and constantly reassess our previously immoveable views on parenting. Your exploration has not been limited to the outside world, but also includes your own position in our family and your role there; you have never been prone to tantrums or to physical outbursts, but over the past year you have evolved an ability to push limits, question actions, and force us to take new, clearer stands. I have come to expect no less from you than a discussion, albeit not always a calm one, about not new requests, but old requisites. We do our utmost best to always give you a choice by which you can create your own outcome, but you have already begun to see through this and to actually question the validity of the options ("I don't want to do either of those, I want to..."). Your opinions are often clear, though, as is your ability to decide for yourself, if not always what is best then instead what is most desirable, and that is a sign to me of your growing individuality, another sign we take as a reward.

Our life with you continues to be a joy. We have grown comfortable, if not always at ease, with our roles as parents and with the dynamics of our immediate community—our family—and plan to keep it at this size. We greet each new year with eager anticipation and only brief nostalgic looks at the past. The whole world opens before you, and us, with years of learning, traveling, exploring, developing, experimenting. We look forward to it all, and we love you.

It begins

Bedtime for the younger set is between eight and nine o'clock in our house. Some day it will come earlier, but that will be after both Calvin and I are willing to give up his daily three hour afternoon nap. For right now we begin our ritual as the clock approaches eight, and finish, some time later, with three books, a final potty trip, then songs and stories in bed, at which point the last parent in the room (usually Jon) tucks in a hopefully sleepy little boy and heads downstairs. We've already dealt with that phase of perpetual recoiling from the land of nod, when every five minutes one or the other of us is called upon to "open a door," "turn on the white noise machine," "close the door," "find another blanket," and all other such manners of delay. For the most part these dilly-dallyings have subsided.

Imagine, then, my surprise two nights ago at walking up the stairs, heading for my own dream realm at near midnight, only to spy a thin line of light escaping from under that little boy's door. Inside his room our son lay fast asleep, sprawled across the bed surrounded by upwards of twenty books, having turned on his little dresser light by which to enjoy them. I vaguely remember nights spent reading by flashlight well into the hours of morning, and, ignoring niggling worries about his sleeping patterns and crankiness the next day, this was a sight I fell in love with. I collected the books, tucked in the boy, and turned out the light.

The next day, sitting on the front porch eating lunch, a hint of peanut butter all around his adorable little mouth, I asked him about his late night reading. With a very, very sad face he exclaimed that he just wanted to read in bed. How does one say no to that? I was in danger of subverting my parental control, so I offered that if he wished to read in bed we could skip play time and go to bed earlier so that he could do so. "Can we do that tonight?" he asked. Absolutely. And when we did, you'd think he'd died and gone to heaven.

There's no sugar in wooden eggs

Halloween, that sugar laden pinnacle of the child's fall calendar, has come and gone, blessed by the orange rays of a miraculously warm fall sun. We're holiday fans here, and Halloween is no exception, so after breakfast we packed up and headed into Ann Arbor for the costume parade and trick-or-treating along Main Street.  Calvin chose his own costume this year (from an array of offered ideas, of course), opting to be a scarecrow - the easiest (and cheapest) home cooked costume ever: I got a number of fabric swatches from my godmother, Lonnie, and used thick thread and large stitches to put patches on a $2 resale shirt; for his head, a $1 straw hat to which I added ribbon from my craft collection and a couple of additional patches; and for the icing on the costume cake I added handfuls of straw (from the farm down the road) to his sleeves and hat. He was pretty excited about the costume, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it, but he was nervous about approaching strangers to say trick-or-treat.  The candy collecting process, however, was a big hit. In fact, having made rounds in both Ann Arbor and later in our own neighborhood, he came away with copious amounts of candy, none of which we thought he needed to eat. In the end we made a deal with him and he traded in all of the candy he collected (which we promptly passed back out to kids at our own door) for the opportunity to pick out a new toy. Therefore, today, instead of a sugar rush, he has a brand new carton of wooden eggs for his kitchen, with which he is at least equally as happy (the toy lasts longer anyhow) and we are much happier.  I think next year we will be the dreaded house in the neighborhood that passes out raisins.

More pictures in the Halloween 2008 album.

Bear hugs

Having a play-room picnic with his bears.  It's the small moments caught on camera, just like this one, that fill out the gaps in the stories of our lives.  Years from now we will look back at these pictures and we won't remember the moment, or even the day, but hopefully we will remember his tenderness, and that's what I hope to preserve even just a smidgen of.

Learning

I have been asked on numerous occassions by a variety of different people what things I am doing at home in order to prepare Calvin for preschool.  "Aren't you worried that, not being in daycare, he will be behind all the other children when he finally gets there?" they ask.   Well, until now it hadn't occurred to me to be concerned, but tonight I did a bit of research to find out what other moms in my position are doing and came away very reassured (I think my new favorite researcher/writer is bound to be David Elkind, author of The Power of Play, and Miseduction: Preschoolers at Risk).  So we're not spending 20 minutes a day on this lesson, or 10 minutes on that one, but today we walked to the the store and on the way we spent 20 minutes playing on a tree stump; he climbed on it and jumped off; we noticed the rings and counted them to calculate the age; we looked at living trees that were about the same size nearby;  we talked about what things might have been made out of the tree after it was felled (the woodchips at the park, the deck on the nearby house, the furniture in his bedroom), and then we looked for trees that might have been born about the time that one sadly died.  At nap time we read a book about trees, and over dinner he recalled for his dad much of what we talked about.  We spent no structured time in lessons today, instead we learned in play.  Just now I was reminded of all this by a poem I found on an educator's site:

I took his hand and followed

(by Mrs. Roy L. Pfeifer)

My dishes went unwashed today,

I didn't make the bed,

I took his hand and followed

Where his eager footsteps led.

Oh yes, we went adventuring,

My little son and I...

Exploring all the great outdoors

Beneath the summer sky

We waded in a crystal stream,

We wandered through a wood...

My kitchen wasn't swept today

But life was gay and good.

We found a cool, sun-dappled glade

And now my small son knows

How Mother Bunny hides her nest,

Where jack-in-the-pulpit grows.

We watched a robin feed her young,

We climbed a sunlit hill...

Saw cloud-sheep scamper through the sky,

We plucked a daffodil.

That my house was neglected,

That I didn't brush the stairs,

In twenty years, no one on earth

Will know, or even care.

But that I've helped my little boy

To noble manhood grow,

In twenty years, the whole wide world

May look and see and know.