Josephine's birthday came right in the middle of a flurry of others. Lately, nearly every weekend has included another kid's party and frankly, I'm exhausted. I kept her birthday as quiet as my Martha Stewart instincts would let me this year, so Josephine's party was much like last year's, with cupcake decorating and just goofing off. So, the pictures are eerily similar, except fewer of main characters wear diapers and wee new siblings attended too.
There was the tooth-rotting and stomach curdling pink cupcake mayhem...
The kids doing kid things while the parents chatted, everyone enjoying this developing ability for independent play...
One smart ass parent couldn't resist a little mischief, seeing that the children were not as enamored of this classic game as they could have been...
Oh, wait...that was me. But what was amazing was that the kids all figured out how to feel the other stickers with their fingers, and used that as a guide for where to place their own tail. It was uncannily canny of them.
But this year, the greater awareness of what endings mean lent a wistfulness to watching the guests leaving. A knowledge that hanging with her old folks isn't the be-all end-all any more. That it was the friends that were as much fun as the food and presents...
And, a new maturity meant that within minutes, it was the books that she sat down with for quiet time in order to wind down after the party.
Over the next few days, she explored the presents, and made great leaps in how she played with them. The smart-ass bear Coby's questions all get answered correctly. (He gets a lot of STFU in response from me, but she likes him.)
The puzzles now get put together without my help, and there's this new fondness for board games and activities with counting and otherwise showing off newfound smarts...
...and lots of distraction from the bastard hound, who is cat-like in her desire to lay on things on the floor.
And then, on Saturday, while at home with Steve while I worked, she took a two-hour nap. That hasn't happened in ages. And while I assure you, nobody wants to come home from a long day at work to find their kid still sleeping after two hours at six-thirty pm -- the strangest thing about that was how when she woke up, something had changed. Steve and I looked at each other, and said "She grew." During that nap, something in her face, and in her manner, and in her aura altered. It's indescribable. She just grew.
The next day, she did the typical little kid things at Alice's bowling birthday party, like dancing with balloons and begging bags of chips; but she'd nudged over the line toward the big girls instead of remaining firmly with the little kids. She wasn't quite there entirely, but she was watching and learning. She's more like minutes away from being a hair swinging sashaying mouthy pre-teen wearing Love's Baby Soft and walking to the corner store to buy sour gummi worms by herself; and I can't seem to catch a whiff of babyhood off her any more.
Four is pretty great - it's long legs with bruisy shins, a sway-backed posture and mature abdominal muscles reigning that toddler stomach in; and it's growing-out bangs in her eyes and getting her own yogurt from the fridge. And while a lot of this has certainly been developing over time, that two-hour nap refined her features in a way that showed me five, and beyond. I'm now on guard, daring the knuckle dimples to disappear, and for morning breath and her wiping her own poopy bum. It's a year for us both to grow in leaps and bounds.
But thank goodness, this morning, she brought me her yogurt and asked if she could crawl on my lap, and would I feed her like a baby. The answer to that is, and always will be yes - even when I'm eighty-eight and she's fifty-four and I'll take that moment to also tweeze her chin hairs and ask her to pass me my Ben-Gay.
