Four

She isn’t a baby anymore.  She is smart and funny, capable already of collapsing into pre-teen giggles that leave her gasping for breath and turning bright red; a wickedly contagious brand of laughter that is hers alone. 

Don’t be fooled by photographs – this girl is nobody’s princess.  In their make-believe play she is the bad guy, or the hero, or the warrior, never the damsel in distress.  She is strong.

She knows who she is and what she is capable of, and she is not afraid to tell anyone that she can do something all by herself.  And boy, does she like a good challenge.  Just tell her she is too little to attempt something, just try convincing her that she can’t quite swim all the way around the pool yet and she will prove you wrong.  She looks fear in the face and carries on with determination and will.  She sees her older brother’s abilities as records to be beaten.  She can whoop all of us at quite a few board games.

But she is also soft.  She still needs those cuddly moments, still needs to know that she will always be our baby even when she is all grown up.  She is compassionate and empathetic, sweet at just the right times.  She knows her story and likes to hear it, to see the pictures that form a sketch of her beginnings.  And she knows where she is going: currently her life goals include being a mommy, an artist, and an animal trainer (because “I am am much better at teaching animals than you are, Mommy”).  And I have no doubt that she can do all of those things, and more, if she puts her mind to it.

Right now she is our Em, our sweet, funny, brilliant little-big girl.  She is, quite perfectly, four.

Growing Pains

He lost his first tooth last week and he starts Kindergarten next week.

She turned four last week and begins Pre-K next week.
My heart is doing all sorts of weird things this summer…aching, swelling with joy and pride, and longing for a baby that I can’t have.  One minute I am entirely sad that their earliest childhood days are past us, that so soon they will be on to bigger adventures and huge chunks of their lives will be spent with people we really don’t know. Sometimes I am excited at the prospect of having ten hours per week that are really and truly my own, but then that excitement gets tempered by the thought of what I will do with that time.  Who the heck am I, without them?  I am eager to see my children learn and grow, so happy to know that they each have a keen appetite for new ideas and experiences.  And I’m not going to lie and say that it won’t be somewhat of a huge relief to have someone else be the entertainment committee for part of the day because for all of its inherent joys and benefits and greatness, stay-at-home parenthood is entirely exhausting.  But.   But I will miss them like crazy and the feeling of losing them, even for this little while, makes me feel dizzy.
And yes, I will say it out loud: I am having baby pangs, strong ones, pangs like I had when we were first trying to conceive.  My arms ache, baby showers stink again, and I know that if there was a baby available I could pull together a nursery, clothes, and everything else we need in a matter of hours.  I have a mental checklist of where everything is and in which order it should be put in place, according to importance and necessity.  Do I think that these pangs are part side-effect of my big kids going to school?  Yes, but only in part.  I have had an overwhelming feeling of someone being missing from our family for awhile now.  It’s a tough thing, this knowledge, especially when the other half of my marriage (my better half?) doesn’t agree.  So maybe we’re done, but my heart disagrees and I don’t know how to feel.
My mind is trying to get it all under control, trying to remember that this is the natural progression of events in a life, that babies grow up and go off to school and mothers go back to work.  And we don’t get everything we want.  Life carries on and on, whether we want to hold it still or not. 
But man, how I want to hold it still.