It doesn't even feel like it's been four years since you came into our lives. Time starts moving faster once you have children. Everyone tells me that in the blink of an eye, you'll be off to college and then having children of your own. Right now I just try to enjoy the years of your childhood before they pass us by. The occasions that you are still snuggly and sweet and in many ways closer to baby than to little boy.
Those times are further and further apart though. You are able to play with more complicated toys now. Toys that actually require action to work, turning a jack in the box or cranking up a car so that it will propell itself down the hallway. You've never had much interest in toys that don't DO anything. Give you a plastic dinosaur and you'll hold it for a while and then try to bounce it off of a wall by throwing it at the ceiling fan. Give you a play kitchen and you'll climb on it and use it to play king of the hill with your brother. But with a flashlight in a darkened room you are the happiest kid in the world. I keep trying to play Candyland with you, but you want to make up your own rules, (the rules that we end up playing by) which invoves no turn-taking, not keeping the same color game piece and just randomly grabbing cards and moving our men around the board. I really made an effort with Candyland to teach you about sportmanship and turn taking, but you just don't have the attention span for it yet.
You've mastered using the computer mouse. It's taken you several weeks to get it, but now you hold it just like Mommy and Daddy do when you play your games. The website for all of the cartoons that you watch, has age appropriate games that you can play and we can definately say that we've been taking advantage of it. It's nice to have friends come for dinner and move you into the office to play your games so that we can have an adult conversation that's not punctuated by a high pitched voice whining for cookies. We don't let you play that often but when we do, you absolutely love it. I can see how parents that have sworn never to have a video game in the house finally relent. Now when I watch you use the mouse I realize that your generation will start to have carpal-tunnel in their late twenties, from using a mouse from so early in life.
Your birthday was yesterday and it was a fantastic day for you. Your class sang happy birthday to you and you had special frosted birthday cookies after lunch. You had birthday cake after dinner and then got to open the presents from Mommy and Daddy. You got a book of spooky tales, a nerf football, a hypercycle set (two motorcycles that you click into a slot on a ramp so when you crank the hand crank on the side the cycles launch forward at top speed), a ring pop (which you promply ate), the 3rd in the series of Alladin videos and a memory matching game. You were beside yourself with joy. The joy wasn't even from the presents as much as from Mommy taking little brother upstairs so you and Daddy could race hypercycles down the hallway unmolested by your brother.
I'm glad that the terrible twos and tormenting threes are behind us now and we are now standing on the precipace of your boyhood. I think 4 years old might be my favorite age, because you are mature enough to carry on a conversation and have some self control but still young enough that I can carry you upstairs to bed.
Happy Birthday Baby-love,
Mommy
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