Letters to the 3 kids on Matthew and Renee's last night of being 3.
Dear Samuel,
You are an incredibly sweet boy. You continue to be very empathetic, nurturing and creative. You love Star Wars, in which you are ObiWan, and Harry Potter, in which you are Hagrid. You have beautiful cursive hand writing and are starting to read nicely. You matured tremendously at school this year and I think keeping you in Casa for 4 years was a good decision. You are friends with everyone at school, kids, teachers and even parents alike. You continue to love lego and make some pretty fantastic structures. You've also started to understand more how your creations work and need to be balanced. You also continue to love "science experiments" in the kitchen and thankfully are showing a bit more restraint when i ask you to limit the number of ingredients.
You had a great time at the water park today. This is you jumping "through the umbrella" as you so aptly put it. And you loving the bucket of water falling on your head after waiting patiently for it to fill up when the water stopped running. You also loved the water cannons, and tried desperately to get me with them (i was game, but they stopped working when you pointed them out of the main water area). You made friends with several kids, and of course played beautifully with Matthew and Renee.
We've recently started to do a later bedtime with you, and you are loving that. It seems to have given you a sense of pride and a differentiation from Matthew and Renee that we think you needed. You are an amazing big brother to them. You get along so well with both of them independently and together. With Matthew, your interaction is very physical - you guys jump on everything, wrestle, do TaeKwonDo moves, rearrange the furniture. You talk to Renee, and do more calm activities like puzzles, reading, drawing. Both love doing Lego with you.
Te quiero con todo mi corazon mi amor Samuelito.
Dear Renee,
You are all girl, incredibly precocious, and a true chatter box. On your own volition, you learned how to write your name in cursive, you recognize many print and cursive letters, you colour within the lines pretty easily. You adore puzzles. You are prolific in the world of arts and crafts, in particular you love cutting little pieces of paper into even smaller pieces of paper and then putting them in envelopes. You have used almost an entire box of old business cards. You came home from school with big folders of work every week, work that impressed your teachers, Regi, Andy and us. Your work includes lots of metal insterts, tracings, multi-page books. We bought you a pink lego set and you are really getting into it. A few weeks back, you built the little house pretty independently following the instructions. At one point in the booklet, I asked you how many bricks the picture had, you counted and said "four". I asked you how many you already had and you said "one", the next question was "so how many more do you need" and you took a couple seconds and said "three" and kept working as if it was normal for a girl your age to do subrtaction.
You are incredibly strong willed and vocal about what you want. This has always been who you are. I remember saying at your baby naming that my wish for you was for you to always have the voice you had then, and indeed you do. You get very hurt and need lots of hugs and kisses for reassurance when things don't go your way. we think this may be because you have such a strong need to be in control of things around you, when things don't go your way the dissonance is too much for you. Sometimes, when you don't get what you want, one of your brothers will step in and help you get whatever it was. This often happens with the blue car seat which both you and Matthew prefer - when you want it, and he gets it, you ask him for it with a sweet smile and he often acquiesces. You are a chatter box (in Spanish, I would say "arguendera"), we get a constant running commentary of everything you do, your brothers do, kids at school do, we do.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention your physical appearance, You are strikingly beautiful. People stop us on the street to comment on your looks. You hair has stayed blonde, your eyes blue, your skin porcelain, your features refined. Photogenic though, you are not and so no picture comes close to giving you justice. You ask for lipstick, nail polish and earnings. Pink continues to be your favourite colour, and you choose to wear it pretty much daily.
You still love tugging our ears at bedtime and during the night. And when i tell you that you can't because my ears hurt, you siply explain "no they don't Mami, you went to the doctor and now they don't hurt.
Te adoro mi chiquita preciosa.
Dear Matthew,
You are all boy, through and through. You are incredibly physical, with great strength and coordination. You run fast, you break wood boards (yes plural) at TaeKwonDo, you jump from the 5th and 6th steps and land solidly on both feet. You go to the top of the monkey bars at school (a dome, about 6 feet tall) and ahve tried to teach me how to do the same on more than one occasion - "you put your foot here Mami, and then your hands, see it's easy". You can almost get up the climbing wall at school unaided. You love pretending to be a dog, you bark, you lick. You love hiding under blankets, and you love, love, love, love being tickled and when we pretend to eat you.
You love building structures, from wooden blocks, from lego, from train sets, and you build them your own way, like the Brown Stairs vertically, or train tracks as walls for hour cars' "houses". Playing blocks with you is really about watching you build, you are not a big fan of my building approach "Mami, that's not cool, this is cool". And you love seeing how big and tall you can make your structures. You are also really getting into Lego, especially the ones that are similar to Samuel's.
You are a happy, happy boy, smiling, charming and befriending everyone. You continue to be friends with kids in daycare, a real testament to the relationships you foster since you left daycare 10 months ago. You are incredibly social at school. I get emails from lots of parents from the school asking for playdates with you - kids your age and older ones too. You participate as fully as you can in the games that the older kids play and are pretty much an equal with them on the "BayBlades" front.
You have an incredible ear for languages and music. Your Spanish, French and Hebrew are impressive and your Enlgish diction is very strong.
Matthew, mi tesoro, te adoro.
I'll say it even though it is cliché - I can't believe how they have grown up. When Matthew and Renee were born my standard answer to the question of how hard things were was "it will be better in 2012". I started saying it randomly "how long will your mom be here helping you" led to "until 2012"; "you must be sleep deprived" got "I'll sleep in 2012" etc. This was a marker year in my head and here we are. As much as I chose it randomly at the time, this year really had marked a milestone. We are having a lot of fun, playing, talking, doing the day to day. The kids take showers, Samuel by himself. Everyone is potty trained. They like helping in the kitchen. They can play independently and with us. We can talk at dinner time. We can stay out late. Sleep is more independent than it used to be (independent for the boys, not quite for Renee). They can buckle their car seats and are almost in boosters.
Renee recently reminded me that Matthew used to say "this is my whole life" when we got home after being out, or when the five of us where together. And so I end the ode to the 3 kids, and to Matthew and Renee being 3 by saying "this is my whole life", and how blessed is that!
