The State of the Boo

Dear Boo,

This past Friday was your seventh (!) birthday, and your first ever sleepover. Well, first sleepover at our house, that is. You had three friends come over after school, and the four of you plus your big sister proceeded to spend the next 8 hours alternately: 1) presenting a true-to-the-movies recreation of the Harry Potter series (complete with arguements over who was going to be Hermione and who was going to be Voldemort). You, predictably enough, were Hedwig and you capered around flapping your arms and hooting; 2) eating your way through vast quantities of food - for five reasonably normal sized children of your age, you can put away a remarkable amount of cheese pizza. And carrot sticks. And broccoli. And Tangtastic Haribos. And chocolate cake...; 3) having drama-filled relationship meltdowns and makings-up over a time course that would make a soap opera star's head spin.

It was a lovely party, and I think everyone had a good time, except when I had to camp out in your room at 11:00 pm and tell two of you little gabbers to "Stop. Talking. Now." in a very serious tone of voice every 3.5 minutes until you actually shut up and went to sleep. The next day was punctuated by having a lovely time until everyone else went home and then stomping off upstairs in high dudgeon over...something? Your sister found you passed out on the guest bed a little while later, and mid-afternoon when you finally woke up, you were back to your usual sunny self.

It's been quite a year for you m'dear - you are in the oldest class at your school, and you have handled the increasing pressure of next school assessments with nary a blip. I think it helps that you only did one assessment, because your parents have chosen logistical ease over all else and are sending you off to the same school as Devil. I have discovered though this process that you have fewer inhibitions around strange adults when your parents are absent; the faculty member that interviewed you described you as "quite a character". Apparently that is a good thing (sometimes it's really hard to tell with the Brits...), and I'll be happily popping you on the bus alongside your sister next autumn.

You continue to attack the world with fearlessness and curiosity, as evidenced by your recent "mastery" of alpine skiing. I put mastery in quotes because, although you are now competent to ride up on a lift and schuss down ski slopes in a variety of colors, your concern with anything other then pure speed (i.e. turning, stopping, not killing anyone...) is perhaps a bit lacking. In one notable exception over half term, you decided to use the banks of snow on the edge of the trail to slow yourself down. Imagine your surprise when this tactic resulted in you jamming the tip of one of your skis into the bank, popping it loose and launching yourself over the side of the trail into the unknown. Thankfully, I skied over to find you lying on your back, laughing like a loon. Good thing you have rubber bones kiddo...hope they hold on long enough to get you to the Winter Olympics in 2030.

As always, it is a pleasure being you mother 95% of the time (Monday mornings could take a long walk off a short pier and never come back, but I think most people feel that way). I love you so very, very much, and I can't wait to see what adventures you get into next.

Love,
Mummy

Tour de Flee...pause, rewind: a Letter to my Daughter

So right about now is when, historically, I would be posting scads of pictures with piles (small or large!) of handspun yarn that I've been cranking out over the last twelve days. However, this post is going to be about, and to, my oldest child:

Dear Devil,

Yesterday was your last day of school for the year. That is an exciting thing, but this year I think it's particularly important to stop and take stock of what you've experienced this year, and acknowledge that it has been Very Hard.

In September, you bravely set off to start Year 3 at a new school. Hard enough, right? But further complicated by the fact that you were moving from a school with one class in your year group (of three year groups) to a school with five classes in your year group, and six (!) years worth of students. In other words, from a school of about 55 kids (not including the Nursery because really, they're too young) to a school of more then 300.

The first time you cried in the car on the way home because your best friend said she wasn't going to be friends with you anymore was in late November, and it absolutely broke my heart. We had endless discussions about how sometimes people say things, without realising they may really hurt someone's feelings, and that it was important to remember that friendships fluctuate, and people change. It's helped that the time course of relationship changes in your peer group is on the order of hours or days rather then longer, and who your best friend is can change over the course of lunch.

Over the course of the last two terms your attitudes and responses to the vagaries of 8 year old girl social dynamics have changed so much that I feel a bit like I've gotten whiplash as you've rushed by. Now, you can tell me about who your new BFF is, and who is friends with whom, and who's not, and all the intricate ins and outs of the social hierarchy with relative equanimity. I can not begin to express how big this is for you, and how much time and work you've put in to getting there.

But here's the thing: for an extremely bright, self-confident little girl you have a remarkably thin skin. I don't think I realised how sensitive you are until this year, when my approach of "Oh well, never mind, she'll be friends with you tomorrow..." was met with floods of tears and general hysteria as if the world was ending. Because for you, the world was ending, in a way: it is critical to your happiness that you have a best friend, someone you can count on to have lunch and play with on the playground and sit with in class. Maybe it's the age, maybe it's the change in the size of your peer group, maybe it's the combination of Very Strong Personalities amongst the girls in your class in particular, but the whole mix has been something of a perfect storm of pre-teen drama.

The most important change I think I've seen in you this year is this: your sensitivity, while still there, has been tempered with a bit of distance, and the experience that even if J says you're not her friend anymore today, by the end of the week the two of you will be thick as thieves again. You are a lovely, loving little girl who has managed to come through a serious social challenge with her confidence intact and strengthened. And I am so proud.

Love you kiddo,
Mummy

Six. Wait, what?

Dear Boo,

Well sweetie, on thursday, you turned six years old.

It's been a big year for you, hasn't it? You're at school all on your own with out your big sister around as a buffer, and until recently that's been just fine by you. But you spent most of the month of February at home either sick or on half-term, and going back has been a bit of a struggle. Mostly I think because you are still a bit overwhelmed by vast numbers of people focusing on you (hmmm...I wonder who you get that from?) and wanting to talk to you and find out what's happening and on and on and on. It's all a bit much for a girl who is still perfectly happy to do her own thing and play on her own without a lot of input from anyone else. Day by day you are getting better with the transition, and I'm glad to see it.

You are still on track for your future brilliant career as a vet, although it's up in the air whether you're going to go into the small animal or livestock versions of veterinary medicine. Or maybe a zoo, who knows?



Your sister continues to be your best friend ever, except when she's not. Sadly, those moments are becoming more and more frequent as you two figure out how to resolve your differences, but generally speaking she is your inseparable companion. I think you've missed her at school this year, but its also been a good opportunity for you to be out on your own in the world.

You are evidencing some pretty phenomenal focus these days my dear. Sometimes, it's the most frustrating thing in the world as you seem to honestly not hear me when I ask you to put your shoes on forty two times in the morning. That same focus has also resulted in this,

and this, which makes your fiber-obsessed mother over the moon with joy (have to find a good hiding place for my stash).

I can't wait to see what the next year brings kiddo!

Much love,
Mumma

7 years, 7 months and (just over) 7 days

Dear Devil,

Well, well, well...here we are. Your seventh birthday was in March, and here it is November and no birthday letter? Mother-blogger fail in a major way. Let's see if I can fill everyone in on what's been happening with you.

And boy, has a lot been happening with you. In your seventh year you weathered a number of challenges with ever increasing aplomb. You dealt with a serious increase in academic demands while your Year 2 teacher tried to get your class ready to move on to primary school. You overcame your fear of the unknown in stellar fashion, and discovered that sometimes taking a scary step into the unknown can work out really well.

You built on that new confidence by happily jaunting off to a very strange foreign country, and tried all sorts of bizarre and strange things - riding on an elephant, eating some very different food, and spending a lot of time in a car not going anywhere very quickly - and were enthusiastic about most of it.

Then came September, and a brand new school. I was sure that on the first day, I was going to take you to the bus stop to go off on your own, and that I would have to do some serious damage control to get you onto the bus by yourself to go off to the unknown. Boy did you surprise me! The bus pulled up, you gave me a kiss goodbye, and happily hopped on and sat down. Off you went. Your transition to a school approximately five times the size of the one you left has been amazingly smooth. You've made friends, you've settled in to your new class and your new schedule, you've even taken up new pursuits (stay tuned for many maternal complaints on violin practice in the Twitter feed).

To be fair, we still have our struggles - you have a pretty short fuse when you're tired. Or hungry. Or upset about something. This usually manifests as yelling either at me or your sister. I think I'm finally figuring out strategies for minimizing the tantrums that inevitably erupt. Surprisingly, the toughest times are when something has happened at school to upset you, and if I give you a chance to tell me about it and get it off your chest, that seems to make things much better. I just need to remember to give you the chance, and I'm working on it baby.

I am daily filled with awe and inspiration at the person you are and the person you are becoming. I love you baby.

Mummy (although sometimes it's Mum, and there is some serious adolescence-foreshadowing going on these days....oy)

Sixty months, three weeks and two days

Hey Boo! Guess what?

...

...

...you're five! I know you know this (and are most gleeful about it), but I still have to remind myself that it's been that long since you were a wee pink wriggling slug-thing.

This past year has been a big one for you - we got a dog, so you're no longer the youngest. You started school, and are thrilled beyond belief with being in a real class. You are picking up reading and math like, well, a sponge - you are reading well ahead of our previous experience with Reception (which I suspect is due to a combination of your brains, exposure to your older sister, and an absolutely spectacular teacher who lets you progress at your pace, not the pace of everyone around you). You came home a few weeks ago and informed me you had finished all the Reception maths books and were now doing Year 1 maths. I didn't think much of it at the time, because, well...sometimes a firm grasp on the strictly factual is not your strong point. But then I went to a conference with your teacher and she confirmed that yes, you zoomed through the first two maths books saying "My sister taught me this!" and were now zooming your way through the math for next year. Clearly, this is an area in which you take after your logic-obsessed physics-major father, not me.

It's also been a big year for you socially. You've always been more comfortable playing by yourself, doing your own thing, but this year you've started actually asking for playdates with classmates, and engaging with your peers when we happen to see them around town. It's wonderful to see. To be fair, you are following in Dev's footsteps in making all the boys fall in love with you (there are currently three potential candidates for the future Mr. Boo). I'm just hoping it doesn't come down to drawn swords on the playground at lunchtime.

You adore your sister. And your parents. And your dog. You skip your way merrily to school and are entirely too sunny and cheerful, except when you're not. You are warm and open and loving, and even the tears and tempests are (mostly) short-lived and the sunshine after the rain is as bright as ever. Sometimes there's even a rainbow.

Keep on shining sunshine.

Love, Mummy

Seventy two months, plus or minus

Dear Devil,

On this exact day six years ago, I was at our house in Houston, supremely grateful to be out of the hospital and to have my mother around, and more then a little gobsmacked at the job we'd taken on. I was counting your age in hour and days. Then, for the longest time, whenever anyone asked me how old you were, the unit of time was weeks. It eventually shifted to months, and now it's finally reached years.

You are six years old. The cliche is that time flies, and that's exactly how I feel, even though I remember events all along the course of those six years. Somehow it's gone by so quickly that I look at you and can't figure out where you came from or how we got here. We recently had to go to the US Embassy to renew your passport, and one of the things we had to bring was a photo montage to show how you've grown from a total standard looking baby to the gorgeous creature you are now. While I was putting it together, I realized that I could see the person you are now in those little baby and toddler photos, but I never would have extrapolated forward from those points to now.

This past year has been an incredible one for your brain - in the last few months something has clicked and all of a sudden you are voraciously reading everything you can get your hands on. You told me a few days ago that reading was your favorite thing ever, and I have to agree with you on that one babe - it is amazing. When you and Boo don't want to go to sleep right away, she climbs up on the top bunk with you and you read her stories by the light of a doll someone gave us years ago that has a necklace that lights up. Not the best thing for your eyes no doubt, but I have fond memories of doing the same under my covers with a flashlight for years, so you come by it honestly. And very often in the morning we'll find the two of you snuggled up together cosily, having fallen asleep together the night before.

You and the SRD are huge buddies, and you take your responsibilities as dog trainer very seriously. After an initial attempt to take both of you along to puppy class, your sister stayed home with me last week and you and Daddy had a much better time of it. You came home all excited to show me how to make him lie down, and you love taking him for walks on the Common. And I think all the attention from your friends and other people at school about the dog has made you much more confident - last week Daddy and I came to assembly to hear your class talk about their day at the Golden Hind and Tate Modern. You had to stand up and recite a line about the trip, and you did it with nary a hesitation or stutter - a far cry from last year's end-of-term school play. I'm not sure whether it was knowing the audience, practicing more, or just feeling more sure of yourself, but boy was I proud of you.

I love you sweet pea, even more then ever, and I can't wait to see what the next year brings for you.

Love,
Mumma

Woe is Boo

Crossposted at the other blog

Dear Boo,

Welcome to the life of the middle child. It's now almost 3 weeks after your birthday, and I'm finally getting around to your letter. Poor neglected thing...

It's been quite a year for you. You started off your fourth year by exhibiting a strong tendency towards incandescent and uncontrollable meltdowns, usually without warning. That phase persisted for a while, but things finally took a turn for the better. You've really blossomed over the past few months, and even more so since the wee dog arrived, interestingly enough. About a week after he came home, we had a conference with your teacher, who said "Getting a dog has been so wonderful for her!" We were kind of surprised - how much of a difference could a week make? But apparently my plot to irritate the crap out of all the other parents in the school* by bringing the puppy to pick up and drop off had resulted in a nursery full of kids who only want to talk about puppies. It seems that this trend has given you a whole burst of confidence - you're engaging the other kids, initiating games, joining in with the others. All good things, particularly for someone who has always been happiest playing by herself. It's good to see you branching out kiddo.

On our way to school on your birthday, I asked you if you being four was different from being three. You thought about it for a minute, and said seriously "Oh yes Mumma, I'm much older now." You sure are growing up sweetpea, and I can't imagine how you're going to be grown up enough to start school in the fall. You can't be that old, can you?

I love you Sunny Sunny. Welcome to the world of four.

Love,
Mama

* Wee dog comes to school several days a week, and I've had more then one parent indicate that this is making life difficult for them at home. Sorry! But only a little bit...

60 Months

Dear Devil,

Just over a week ago, you turned five years old. I know it's a cliche to rave about how fast time is going, but I swear to Gourds that only yesterday, you were this:

And in reality (something that I feel I have a tenuous grasp on at the best of times), you are this:

And this:

And this:

You have become oh so grown up and not shy about informing people that you are not a little baby anymore! We went on an expedition with some friends yesterday, and one little girl on the playground made the mistake of referring to the house that you and T were playing in as "the babies' house". You spent the next fifteen minutes following the poor girl around, informing her of the error of her characterization. "We are not babies!" In the end, you were great friends and played together happily until her mother ruined it by leaving, but it's an example of your insistence on fairness and things being right.

Since September, and your first suspicious trip to school, you have become a true convert. You are thrilled to go in the mornings, you proudly tell me when you get stickers on your sticker chart for helping out or cleaning up nicely, and you are usually pretty excited to come home and do your homework, such as it is. Your teacher says that it's as if you've been with your classmates forever, that's how well you've fitted in with everyone.

You are now genuinely reading, which I find more thrilling then I can explain. As someone for whom reading is an incredibly important thing, I'm so happy to see you starting out on the journey, and I can't wait to introduce you to some of the books that I loved as a child (and stayed up late with a flashlight under my covers to read after I was supposed to be asleep. I'm sure you'll do the same.) As a result of learning to read, you're also developing a British/Brahmin accent that would make your paternal great-grandfather extremely proud (not that he cared about that sort of thing, but you sound like him a bit) (although you are much more garrulous then he ever was!) Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to understand what you're trying to say because it's such a bizarre combination of American and English pronounciation. I suspect that this experience, of learning to read phonetically in the UK, will color your and your sister's speech for the rest of your lives. An interesting thought, that this experience may leave such an obvious mark upon you. I do hope it's for the best.

It's been a grand ride this far baby, and I am so looking forward to whatever comes next.

With all my love,

Mama (or, as you now insist, Mum)

36 months of Boo

Dear Boo Boo,

Well m'dear, here we are: yesterday you turned three years old. My overwhelming reaction to this milestone has been hunh? Followed closely by what the fuck? How did this happen?

It's been a big year for all of us, in so many ways. Our last few weeks in Houston were pretty hectic, but you dealt with things with your usual aplomb. As long as you had your a-ni-muls, you were happy. It's still true.

Upon first arriving in England, you were thrown off your game a bit - suddenly you'd gone from hanging with your buds all day to hanging with Mama. This resulted in a bit of an exaggeration in your tendency to separate the world into "Mama" and "not-Mama", otherwise known as "acceptable persons" and "unacceptable persons".

Thankfully, you've decided that other people are also acceptable, which had done a world of good for my sanity.

When you went back to nursery in September, it took you a while to get used to the idea again. Fair enough, but I'm happy to see that now that you've started going to the same school as your sister, most mornings you ask wistfully "Can I go back to Devil's school today?"

Unlike Devil, you are sticking to your Texas-accent guns with a vengeance. Some of your vocabulary has shifted (rubbish, toilet, trousers), but you still say "Mama, I ca-yaan't" with a lovely Southern drawl. The one word that has snuck through, however (your grand-paternal aunties will be thrilled to know), is to-mah-to. Which, given that up until a few months ago, those red things were te-ne-moes, is only fair.

You've become quite the amazing traveler over the past months, happily jaunting off to Scotland, France, Switzerland, the Peak District and North Africa. You've thankfully grown past the stage of not being able to sit still for longer then 25 minutes, which makes plane/train trips with you much more enjoyable.

Yesterday, we had a very low key party for you (poor second born!). T and M (our first friends in the UK) came over with their parents. You made animal masks and ran around the house screaming while we had tea and tried to carry on semi-normal, grown-up conversations. I fed the four of you sausages and to-mah-toes and carrots, and you happily blew out the candles on your (personally decorated) cupcakes. It was a lovely afternoon, and though you were a bit grey by bedtime, you were still your usual cuddly, snuggly self. And when we were putting you two to bed, you chattered blithely away through Daddy's and my's stories until suddenly you fell quiet. Sound asleep in mid-sentence. Well done kiddo.

Much love,

Mama

PS - Sorry about the blanket baby. One of these days I'll get it finished, I promise.