To Sydney on her 4th Birthday

When you were born I had no idea what to expect in the years to come. And up until now, though you outgrew your baby clothes and started walking and talking and eating real food, you were still our first little baby. But the other day you showed up nonchalantly at the sugar house, having walked down the snowy, wooded trail all by yourself, and you thought nothing of it. I, on the other hand, was completely thunderstruck.

Actually, you’re doing that a lot to me, nowadays. Instead of the scribbles and fanciful colors upon the bottoms of which your teachers have dutifully translated what the picture is for us, you’re actually drawing yellow suns and red houses and birds with wings in their relatively correct places. You wrote your name, in recognizable letters and in fairly recognizable order the other day, although the E had a few extra lines in it for good measure and a few of the letters were backwards and one was over in the corner of the page by itself. I’m not saying you’re all grown up, but you’re definitely not an infant, a toddler, a three year old anymore.

You can help out now, and not in the way that your little sister “helps out” by removing all the tupperware from the drawers and scattering it all over the kitchen, or the way you once helped Mommy and Daddy “put the corn to sleep” which involved pulling out the corn plants, laying them on their sides and covering the whole thing over with dirt and then patting them hard (we didn’t have a very good corn patch that year). When asked to bring knives and forks to the table, you take them courteously and you put them right where they are supposed to be. You’ll entertain your sister for awhile so that one of us can make dinner. And you’ll relay messages between parents, although not always with the necessary accuracy (“Honey, Syd says that you said to tell me the washing machine is burning up? I’m sorry, can you explain that again?”) You’re growing into a pretty reliable, well-adjusted kid.

That’s not to say you aren’t still hilarious. At your birthday circle at pre-school, I arrived to find you in crown and cape, and the teacher informed me that Sydney had taken a “birthday vacation” and left Prince Charming to stand in her stead. Super Prince Charming, to be exact, not to be confused with Buzz Lightyear, Mighty Mouse, Super Dorothy, Tin Woman, Emergency Buzz (for those times when you don’t have time to say “to Infinity and Beyond!”) or Super Max. It becomes a bit of a challenge, at times, to keep up with you, especially when you announce out of the blue that you need oil (Tin Woman drinks oil, you see. Because water makes her rust.) or that I have to take off your spacesuit before you can get into the bathtub. But once I do catch up it’s just a pure pleasure to immerse myself in your world, for all its chaotic, illogical orderliness.

The most amazing thing about you growing up is that it turns out that I am growing up too. Now that I find myself having to concentrate through a haze of conflicting conversations between Daddy and Mommy, Daddy and Sydney, Sydney and Mommy and Sydney Talking To Herself, or trying to drive in a straight line while also trying to right a suddenly up ended water container, I’m a lot more sympathetic. Patience has become my middle name. Trying to come up with definitive answers to seemingly obvious questions such as “how do they make light bulbs?” has made me realize that I really don’t know all that much and that what I do know isn’t really black and white. Most of all I’ve learned that you cannot cook the best steak in the world at the same time that you are trying to prevent your almost 1 year old from climbing up the stairs and your 4 year old from writing on the walls. Multi-tasking means compromising at best.

So, Sydney, we’ve made it to four. In another four years, you’ll be eight. In 4 times 4, you’ll be learning to drive. And 4 after that you’ll be out on your own. But that’s a lot of fours down the road.