Eugenious

Dear Sylvan,

You’re really 3 1/2 now, an age you’ve been calling yourself for the past few months. You understand ages better than I would think someone with little knowledge of fractions could: you know that after you’re 3 1/2, you’ll be 4, then 4 1/2, etc. Each age is a compartment, or so I imagine it in your brain. You’ve got the sequence in hand, and you even said to me today: “I’m 3 1/2 and Elena’s zero; when I’m 6, Elena will be 3.” I actually remember thinking, when I was about your age, that I’d never be older than my older friends, and it was sort of an epiphanic moment; it saddened me then.

Your understanding of numbers isn’t always so obviously accurate. Witness this conversation with your Dad:

Daddy: “If I have seven of something and you have eight of something, who has more things?”

Sylvan: “Mommy!”

But your understanding of your Mommy is accurate – especially if we’re talking about Mommy having more chocolate.

During the past couple of months, you’ve developed a friendship with Camilla. I won’t tell any stories that might embarrass you later, but suffice it to say that you’re crazy about Camilla and she’s crazy about you. When you see each other at school, you start giggling and making Happy Talk hands, facing each other and smiling. While I don’t expect Camilla to drop you like a hot potato (not only do I think you’re a little young for the fickleness of middle school friendships, but Camilla is such a genuinely sweet person that I don’t think it would cross her mind not to include her Sylvan in her circle), the depth of your joy with this friendship makes my heart both swell and break for you, for the deep love and the deep pain that we humans cause each other. I don’t mean that last sentence as a warning. But I will be here to hug you when your heart breaks.

You and I have given up your naps this past week. Since September, you’ve rarely slept at school on the couple of afternoons you’re there each week. I have been dreading this, although now that I’m not spending an hour and a half trying to get you to take a nap, it’s much less stressful, of course. We still read books and I leave you to spend some quiet time in your room in the late afternoon. You read books to yourself one recent afternoon and jumped on your bed for 45 straight minutes on another.

Sometimes I wonder if whoever coined the term Terrible Twos meant Terrible Threes. But that’s not alliterative. Thankless Threes? I feel that way on the difficult afternoons, when you and I are butting heads, sometimes literally, when you are having a difficult time curbing your whining and so am I, frankly. But you are definitely becoming a better listener and helper. You made yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich yesterday, from removing the bread and jelly from the fridge to slapping the slices of bread together. I helped with the twist tie on the bread bag, a little final peanut butter spreading, and cutting your sandwich into nine pieces, per your request.

How about Thecodont Threes? That’s probably most appropriate, given your new interest in dinosaurs, especially pteranodons.

You’re becoming more and more independent, which is great, given that, even though Elena’s pretty low-maintenance for a nearly seven-month-old, she still needs to have her diaper changed and be taken upstairs for naps. You have created some fantastic train tracks and glued together some fun collages recently, all under your own steam.

Sylvan wears a homemade bracelet and necklace

You still love letters and sounds, and, if you ask me a word and I suggest that you sound it out, you ask pertinent questions, like, “Does this C make a ck or ss sound?” Recently, you spelled WMM with alphabet blocks, then said, “Look, Daddy, it says ‘Wuh! Muh! Muh! That’s what Elena says: ‘Wuhmuhmuh!'”

I’ll leave you with a joke, the first you’ve told, as far as I know:

How do light bulbs and light fixtures learn to fly?

They just need to be a weathervane!

Yeah, I don’t get it either, but I’m willing to laugh with you.

Love,

Mommy

And check out Sylvan on Oregon Wild’s website. Chandra invited us to join an Oregon Wild snowshoe to Fish Lake last weekend, and she blogged about it on their website, so I needn’t.

And did anyone know that a crumb-saster is “a disaster where crumbs fall all over you”?

Dear Sylvan,

When we picked up a few items at Sundance the other day, while hauling a grumpy Elena, you were the magic man. You found a grocery cart, steered it into the store, and then started grabbing the items we needed off the shelves: “Where’s the tofu, Mom?” “Do we need milk?” Whoa. Really? It’s a far cry from the child I’ve had to restrain, occasionally kicking, in the cart – and that was only last week.

You’re helping out more in the kitchen now, too; you love to cut vegetables with a plastic knife (which means that you have to REALLY want to cut vegetables, because those knives are about as sharp as fingernails), you like to help make PBJs, and pouring and mixing flour is clearly on the road to heaven (you’d drive your trains through the cookie batter if I’d let you).

All this after being quite concerned about you a month ago. After flying to the east coast for Christmas, you had become a little monster I didn’t recognize while we visited family. I was, frankly, really worried about flying back to the west coast with you. Yes, to be fair, I worry too much, but I thought you might pull some sort of kicking/screaming tantrum for the entire twelve hours, because that’s the kind of behavior you’d been exhibiting during our visit. The moment our family again became four people, though, you morphed back into a human – even a lovable human. You sat and put stickers into a sticker book, you watched movies on my computer, you wanted to ride the train at the Denver airport, you made polite requests for juice and cheese. It’s interesting how I expect that my three-year-old to behave perfectly when faced with unfamiliar surroundings when I certainly don’t behave perfectly when faced with my everyday life. I’ll try to remember that you need space, too. You like being alone, which only makes sense, given your parents.

You’ve acquired a best friend, an older woman named Camilla. She’s four and a half and in your class at school. On her sharing day, she chose you to guess what was in her Elmo sharing bag, “because he’s my best friend” (you guessed rain, by the way). You’ve told me that you’d like to go to school every day that Camilla’s there: “Sunday and Monday and Thursday and Friday. Is that all the days?”

While we started a “Sylvan says” list here soon after you started stringing words together, your classroom teachers have recently started a “Sylvan says” list. In fact, the pre-school room NEXT to yours has also started a list for you, because you visit them, too, and, frankly, the next thing that comes out of your mouth might be hilarious. You recently announced to your teachers that, “actually, pickles are an acquired taste.”

Love,
Mommy