Three

Her baby rolls are slowly disappearing, her crazy blond curls are getting longer and longer and she’s nearly as tall as her almost 6 year old sister. Breaking all promises that she made to me, my sweet Lilliana Scout went ahead and turned three a few weeks ago and shows no signs of slowing down. I could dwell on the bittersweet aspect of watching my babies grow up or tell you about how I inevitably end up sniveling like a fool the night before either girl’s birthday. I imagine I always will, or at least as long as we are all under the same roof.

In the meantime, I take pictures and tuck them away. More often than not, the pictures I take don’t actually involve a camera. I’m talking about those moments we all have where you can just look around, close your eyes and know that you’ve just burned an indelible image into your memory.  If you ask me when Lilly rolled over or when she first said a full sentence or whether she had a hard time with teething, I couldn’t tell you, not without doing some research anyway. It’s as if you are asking me about things that happened a lifetime ago and if it happened during her early months, well, that’s all a bit hazy anyway. But I can remember the smell of her head, the tight grip of her tiny hands that still reach for mine when we walk together, and how she felt as an infant tucked up against me in bed, swaddled like a small burrito on so many mornings long after Mike and Zoe had left the house for the day. The pictures that we take without a camera aren’t just visual candy–you can smell them and hear them and feel them.

At three years old , Lilly wakes up singing most mornings, often at the top of her lungs. For no apparent reason, she incorporates Christmas carols into her repertoire on a year round basis.  Christmas carols seem to suit her though, with their themes of joy and exultation. I hope that when I am old and grey, I will be able to close my eyes and hear the sound of that little voice belting out whatever moved her on any given morning. Right now, I know every one of her wild ringlets by heart but I hope that in 20 years,  I will still be able to picture her small and perpetually sticky hand always wiping the hair out of her eyes. I hope that I will always be able to close my eyes and hear her say “I love you more than moon and stahs, mama” as she says every night after she is tucked into her crib and we say goodnight. (stahs=stars, as pronounced with Lilly’s curiously thick Boston accent.)

At three years old, Lilly is the epitome of pure gusto. Everything is an adventure and everyone is a potential friend. Her hugs are long and heartfelt and her faith in the good of people has yet to be challenged. Three is innocence and imagination and all of the possibility in the entire world every single day. There are glimpses, tiny glimpses of a new self consciousness that is emerging in some social situations but overwhelmingly, Lilly at three is still full of the purest kind of self confidence and and a strong belief that she is fabulous, just the way that she is.  I hope that even as she discovers she’s not perfect, she can still embrace being true to herself, whoever that person turns out to be. I hope that even as she discovers that no one is actually perfect, she will still have faith in the good of people.

Lilly turned three on a Friday, on May Day to be precise.  I tried to fill her day with all of the sorts of things that would make her even happier than usual, which is no small feat.   We squeezed in pancakes and bacon, the Children’s museum, bouncing, dinner at a restaurant and of course, some presents  to tear open throughout the day. Mostly though she was eagerly anticipating her party on Sunday, the first “real” birthday party that she’d had a voice in.  She chose to wear her fancy party dress but in true form, it didn’t stop her from running barefoot through the yard until her feet were as brown as the dirt they were covered in. As a person should do when at their own party, she overindulged, in pretzels and juice, pizza and ice cream cake and finally a cake pop when she thought no one was looking. What she couldn’t know  of course is that I am always looking, always watching, always taking those pictures when my camera is nowhere in sight. Someday-sooner than I want to admit-she won’t be 10 feet across the yard for me to look at every day.  So I close my eyes and  I take picture after picture because I’m filling the virtual albums in my mind and in my heart, while she is here now, while she is still all mine.