A letter to my four year old.

You are, in innumerable ways, so perfectly, purely, indelibly, ordinary. 

Don’t get me wrong — not for one second — and mistake me for saying that you’re not anything special. Everything you do is tinged with special. With the extraordinary. But framing up all that extraspecialness is… a pretty run-of-the-mill toddler. Just a kid. Your typical preschooler. I find it, you, so comfortingly, frustratingly, expected. 

Just like so many four year olds before you… 

You stall like a champion, award-winning, black-belt, heavy-weight staller. 

You can do it yourself. 

You bang on everything.

You jump off everything, oftentimes while banging on something. 

You can do it yourself.  

You beg me and your dad not to kill ants or spiders or mosquitoes. (I always listen (except for the mosquitoes) and your dad becomes Rambo in the presence of anything with more legs than us.)

You can do it yourself.

You sing Old Town Road… the Emmett remix (“Got the ‘Vengers in my bag and the Snoopy Dog poop”). 

Everything is a competition. 

You love to be read to, to be sung to, to stand up when you pee especially when you’re outside. 

Your hide-and-seek skills are still woefully underdeveloped. 

You can count high and spell your name and you tell the best bedtime stories. 

You dance, you march, you race, you skip, you play, you snuggle, you laugh, you entertain. 

You ask questions. So. Many. Questions. 

You can do it yourself unless you need help and then you cry. 

And all that means I become every run-of-the-mill repetitive mom of a run-of-the-mill crazy four year old. You hear the same things from me, over and over and over and over and over and that’s not even close to the number of overs I could list. 

Watch where you’re going. 

Yes, you can take a bubble-y bath. And probably to follow it up with a chocolate-y treat. 

Be careful.

No, you can’t climb on that. 

Stop climbing on that. 

Get down. 

Pull your pants up. 

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD be careful. 

I love you too. 

This year, baby, let’s work on figuring out where you can be special, and where it’s okay to just be. I can’t wait to see where your extraordinary self takes you. What excites you and scares you and challenges you. It’s going to be an exciting, scary, challenging year, my little love, in all kinds of ordinary fourth-year ways. 

I hope you’ll carry mommy’s words forward with you, through four and into forever. Watch where you’re going. Take time to relax and smell good. Eat the treats. Pee in designated spots only. Be careful, my brave wrecking ball. How I love you, Emmett James.