You just nod and smile when parents tell you, "It goes so fast." You don't understand until you are here, when you can't believe that it has been three years. It has been three years* since I met you, my beautiful girl, my lovely. It's passed in a blink. Yet, when I look at photos of you as an infant, it seems impossible that such a tiny thing is you. You were the sun of my world then; I had no idea how much brighter you would shine.
Everyone notices your hair, your magnificent mop of strawberry blond curls. Your hair seems to strike something deep, and people come over to talk to you, to tell us stories about a brother or sister or daughter who had hair just like that, and how amazing it is. I try to tame it into softness each morning, as you screech with every pull at every snarl, but it's a wild tangle at the end of the day; you are too busy for it to stay perfect. It mirrors your energy, your verve, your liveliness. I will be sad the day that you discover the blowout.
You are somehow old enough to be in preschool (PRESCHOOL!), thriving. Your teacher tells us that your smiley, bubbly personality that lights up the room. That the other children gravitate towards you, attracted by your energy, and by your penchant to be silly whenever someone else is. One of your new friends is Clara, who is quiet, and who you seek out in class, asking her to do things with you. You are a leader, an instigator. Ms. Lindeman tells us that you are also a peacemaker, that you try to mediate disputes among your classmates. I wish I could be a fly on the wall of your classroom, to see all of these facets, to see you bloom, and marvel at you.
Your Year of Age Two has been mostly lovely. We converse, we play, we imagine, we run, we wonder, together. You have left almost every shade of babyness behind, you are truly a Little Girl now. Sometimes, I try to encourage you to be a Big Girl, but I also think, not too fast, Little Girl, not too fast.
As you've come closer to Three, your ideas, your fears, your angers, and your joys have also grown bigger and brighter. You aggravate, exasperate, amuse us, and dazzle us in turns, minute by mercurial minute. We have tidal waves of tantrum, where there used to be none, over the smallest things - pajamas, a cup. You want so much to do everything yourself, even the things I am sure you cannot do. Sometimes, you prove me wrong, and then I am humbled and proud.
Right now, your favorite things are: chocolate milk, lollipops, popcorn, Cars 2, fuzzy winter pajamas, macaroni, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, your polka dot shoes, any pair of pink pants, your ladybug rain boots, your teacher, your friends Luke and Rome and Clara and Nia, running down the sidewalk full-tilt, climbing anything that can be climbed (and many things that should not be climbed), eating Cheerios with milk, riding piggyback on Mama, riding to school on the back of Papa's bicycle, painting, Play Doh, and pouring water (or anything else you are allowed to pour), helping Mama make smoothies and coffee in the mornings.
Your least favorite thing is to have to stop doing anything that you are engrossed in for any reason, unless you are very, very hungry. Or unless a trip across the street to the dry cleaner is involved, where the doting Korean owners unfailingly admire you and give you stickers.
Some things are the same. How you will go and go and go and go and GO until we slow you down, insist that it is time to sleep. Your laughter, easily brought to the surface with some light tickling, a funny face, a chase. When I look back at old photos and videos, I realize how essentially YOU that you were, even then, even at less than one year old. Your smile, your laugh, are so astonishingly unchanged.
As always, you are ever more you, ever so much more so. I can't believe how much I want to be with you. Most of the time. There are many days I am grateful to ship you off to school, where they can funnel your energy, stimulate you, teach you, without butting up against the tears and fury that you seem to save especially for me. I know it's because you can let your guard down with me and feel safe with all of those emotions, so big in your tiny body. Some days, it is hard.
Then on other days, the big emotions are positive, where you just say, out of the blue, "I love you soooo much, Mama!" I die. I melt. I am yours. My big, big (little) girl. The happiest of days, of years, of lives to you.
*Let's all pretend it's actually Novemeber 19, and that I got this posted on my girl's birthday.
