Two

To my darling wee boy

To my mind there is now way that my littlest baby can be two.  Whenever I’ve been the mother of a two year old before I’ve always either been heavily pregnant or also the mother of a newborn and as I am/have neither, there is just no way that you can really be two. Perfect Mama-logic. Except for the fact that you really actually are two.

For all the times when you snuggle in my arms to go to sleep, there’s really no denying that the baby that can also give me quite a hefty accidental thwack between the shoulder blades with a rogue hockey stick is fast leaving his babyhood behind.  When I was putting together your birthday video I could suddenly see so clearly how much you have changed in the last year, and why lots of people we meet are a bit surprised to find out just how little you are.  At age two you’re wearing age 3-4 clothes, with size 7 feet, and the jumper that I knitted for your birthday will also easily fit your next biggest sister; they day when you’re taller than her is coming sooner than we think.

The only thing waiting to catch up is your teeth, you finally have your fourth bottom tooth coming in to match the four on top and you’ve just rather painfully acquired four molars but you’re far from having a full set just yet.  It doesn’t keep you from your food though, and if anyone has something you’ll be after a bite, even if it’s met with the most amazing pouty face and an “I no like it Mummy!”.  On our way travelling back across Europe we asked all three of you what your favourite part about the trip so far had been, expecting perhaps tales of watching thunder storms in the mountains or climbing forest towers but quick as a flash you came back with “chok-lat”.  Well it was pretty good chocolate, I’ll grant you that.

I suspect your real favourite was all the times when you could just be outside exploring at your own pace, be it paddling at the edge of a lake and throwing stones into the deep water, or finding a stick and setting about digging a nice big hole in the dirt right in front of our tent.  Like your sisters before you, you love being outside, and the more mud pies the merrier, much to your poor Daddy’s dismay when your favourite digging spot in the garden turned out to be where he’d previously been trying to re-grow a bit of lawn. You love hockey and football and golf and I’m pretty sure while we were travelling you invented a version of croquet using the tent mallet It has to be a really miserable day to keep you from the garden.

You love the water too, even if you are convinced that any expanse of water that isn’t a puddle is a bath.

“Look Mummy! Bath!”
“That’s the English Channel sweetheart; it’s a bit bigger than a bath!”

On the days when we’re besieged by the weather you make a beeline for your train tracks.  It doesn’t matter if you can make them join up or not, though you’re getting better with practice, you just like to play with all the different pieces and then usually send a few trains hurtling off the edge of a cliff.

Last summer on a whim and to give you something to play with in the car we bought you a few “Petit Bebe T’choupi” board books, just pictures and the words in French, and a whole year later they’re still your favourite books, and I’ve added a good few bits and pieces to my French vocabulary from reading them to you on a near daily basis.  Until recently you’ve not been too bothered about snuggling in for stories as your sisters do, you would always listen and play at the same time but now I think you’ve started to figure out that it’s fun to see the pictures too and I love having you curl up and claim your spot too, it makes bedtimes all the more fun.

In the last few months, and even the last few weeks you’ve had a real language explosion, and you’ve gone from random words to trying to put together little sentences.  You are our little mimic at the moment and when you’ve got something that we understand and respond to then you’ll tell us lots of times just for the fun of it.  I think the last hour of our journey to Calais this week was punctuated with “Underground tunnel. I go in Underground Tunnel Mummy!”, and so we did.  You’re using it to good effect when we go shopping too, if I ask you what else we need you’ll invariable say either “Like Beer Mama!” or “Daddy Monster!”; and you’re so proud to take it to him when we get home, even if a beer at 11am wasn’t quite what your father was planning.

Oh my little boy at two you are just so much fun.  You are at times loud with joy and loud with rage; boisterous and yet so sweet when we remind you to use your gentle hands.  You adore your sisters and you’re becoming more and more their equal every day, especially with your middle sister.

We took these pictures on your birthday itself, heading out after supper with your balloon to take advantage of the gorgeous evening light, and after we’d run around the windmill a few times, and taken photos of you hugging/attacking your balloon, I tried to take pictures with the sails in the background, lying on my back in the long grass.  But where I went, so you wanted to be, and you came and lay down on my tummy, gazing upwards at the last few clouds of the day, just content to be with me, and it was the perfect way to end a day of singing and laughter and start a whole new year of adventures.

Love Mummy