Three!

***Apologies for the late posting: a monster thunderstorm occasioned my loss of Internet yesterday. Naturally.***

A Few Edwardian Tidbits

-Edward is a reader, and spends much of his day looking through his many books or -- preferably -- being read to by Mom or Dad. We go to the library two or three times a month to check out (and return) 4-5 books, and he typically has them memorized before the next trip. This week's favorite, incidentally, is one that Robert picked out, called Always a lot of Heinies at the Zoo. We read it to Edward 5 times before nap time came around today. Impeccable taste, that little toddler of ours has. However, before nap-time the boys prefer to read any one of the Babybug children's magazines we have; before bed, they prefer any one of the Alfie books. Otherwise, it's library books for us.

-Edward loves trucks of all kinds, and is quite the expert when it comes to identifying them all: various kinds of cranes, excavators, dump trucks, and so forth, are all categorized and logged away in his mind, and he can recall them with amazing speed as we pass them on the road.

- Edward is potty trained. He tells me when he needs to go -- and then he goes. In fact, he can even hold it for 5-10 minutes if, say, we're in the car when he makes his announcement. This is nice. Very nice. I do have to turn the bathroom light on for him and help him get his pants back on, but otherwise he's pretty self-sufficient potty-wise.

-In all his three years of life, Edward has never been an eager eater. He picks at his food, and regularly takes hours to eat his breakfast (not all of which hours are spent at the table: he'll eat a bite or two, then declare himself "done" for the hour). Were it not for the fact that he seems energetic and healthy enough, I would wonder whether he got enough to eat. I still wonder -- but I try not to worry, even when he goes 20 hours or more with nothing but milk. If, at that point, I force a few bites down his throat, I hope I may be forgiven.

-Edward's favorite game involves being "challenged" by Joseph the giant teddy bear in his room. With its limbs animated by Joseph, the bear and Edward go into a no-holds-barred, all-out wrestling war guaranteed to generate shrieking giggles of delight. Edward calls this game "being mean to bear." I don't know whether I should be glad that he apparently knows that such behavior qualifies as "meanness," or horrified that he seems so fond of the game. Either way, I am certainly grateful that his favorite games do not involve "being mean to Robert."

- Although Edward continues to learn new words every day, he is really quite articulate and capable of expressing his needs accurately. However, two amusing speech cutenesses persist in spite of all our efforts to correct them: first, he says "fridge" when he means "bridge." I don't know why. Second, he sometimes switches words when saying compound nouns. "Fish-star" for "starfish" is his most common (you'd be amazed how often this one comes up), but the practice pops up elsewhere from time to time.

-Edward's "driving" skills are already amazing. When we go out driving, he knows when and where I need to turn to get just about everywhere we ever go. In fact, he knows our city better than I do: he is always aware of which park is closest to our current location, and often tries to convince me to "turn that way, Mommy! Let's go to Morreene Road Park, okay?" as we drive by the appropriate exit. (There are, it should be noted, over 50 public parks featuring playgrounds in the city of Durham, and we're familiar with nearly half of them.) The other day, while we were out running errands in the car, I pulled to a stop at a red light. Edward declared matter-of-factly: "Oh dear. That's a red light." Then, encouragingly, he added: "Come on green light! Come on! You can do it!"

-Imaginative does not even begin to describe this boy. Appearing at my side with his hand stuck inside an empty toilet-paper roll, he'll cry out: "Mommy! My hand is gone!" Turning to Robert during dinner, he'll observe "Robert has snakes in his hair!" When I come to check on him in his room, he tells me to "watch out! Don't step on Tigress! He's sleeping." [Pronouns. That's another one we've got to work on. He doesn't yet acknowledge the existence of "she" or "her" as semantic possibilities. My inner feminist is ashamed of me for letting this happen.] This kid was identifying shapes in the clouds before he was a year and a half old.

-Speaking of Tigress, she's Edward's imaginary friend. I'm pretty sure he means the Tigress from Kung Fu Panda, though I hesitate to say for certain. Tigress accompanies us on our daily walks -- and Edward is always very careful about holding her hand when we cross the street. He always makes sure she gets her nap in. He shares his milk with her when we come inside from the heat. What can I say? That Edward is one considerate friend to have.

-Edward is rather skeptical these days. After being informed this morning that it was his birthday, he calmly replied: "no, it's not my birthday." I reacted with an exuberant: "Yes it is! You're three years old today!"
"No, I'm not three!"
"Yes you are, silly! It's your birthday!
"Where's the cake?" He countered, which cake, of course, I did not have immediately on hand first thing in the morning. I guess he certainly showed me. No cake = no birthday, in Edward's mind.

So I guess it's fortunate that we did have one by the end of the day: a flourless, chocolate, train-shaped cake. I briefly considered using brightly colored reds-and-blues to make the train cars, but quickly realized that doing so would defeat the whole purpose of a birthday cake (which purpose is, naturally, to be chocolate), so we went with a drab (but tasty) brown. Come to think on it, most trains I've seen are rather drably colored, anyway. Only children's toys, television, and ostentatious French railways keep up the pretense of trains being brightly colored. For my little skeptic of a "three"-year-old, we went with realism for our train.

-In spite of what he may think, Edward is definitely three: he prefers to do everything himself, gets upset when things don't go his way, and has an opinion about everything. Even so, given the inherent persnicketiness that comes with being three, he shares well (usually willingly, and often generously) with his little brother, and is very patient. He is so very polite, for instance, about reminding me to fill up his milk five minutes after I told him I would do so and then forgot.

-We spent the morning of Edward's birthday at Edward's favorite place in the world: the beach. It was overcast when we went, and a thunderstorm broke out shortly after we left, so I suppose the birthday gods love Edward more than they do his brother. We had a lot of fun, even though Joseph never believed Edward when he [Edward] insisted that he didn't "need to be splashed right now." (Robert, incidentally, learned the word "spash!" by the end of the trip, and gigglingly shouted it whenever his Daddy came by.) Dads are like that. Good thing Edward is so patient.

-Every time I go to the kitchen to begin work on dinner, Edward begs for "poached eggs and tomato soup!", so I was a little surprised when, upon being asked what he wanted for his birthday dinner, Edward shouted immediately: "pizza!" I guess there's a new favorite food in town. It should be noted that these two foods are just about the only ones Edward actually eats: he didn't eat a bite of his cake or ice-cream yesterday, as it took him too long to eat one of the cookies on his piece. Silly boy.

Happy birthday, Edward!

Three years ago today,

you came into our lives

and turned our couple into a family.

You are a loving and creative big brother

and a wonderful son:

we love you!