Sadie turned 4 on February 24th. 4! Birthday celebrations have been joyful and plentiful. On Sunday, 2/24, we hosted family and close-friends to celebrate Sadie’s birthday with us in an Open-House-style party which spanned from 1 to 7 PM. Sounds exhausting, I know, but it actually worked out pretty well. There were 2 waves of arrivals and in-between Sadie & Julia got some time to run around outdoors together. Sadie received many fun & thoughtful gifts, including her own camera from Grammy & Grampy, a hand-made star quilt from Mossy, and a watch from Mom & Dad. Birthday celebrations continued on Thursday, 2/28 when Sadie got to wear the birthday girl crown at preschool and we provided snack – warm blueberry muffins and sliced kiwi and banana. Sadie readily agreed when I suggested muffins as her birthday snack (rather than cupcakes!). Not to worry, there has been plenty of cake to go around. On Saturday 3/15 we hosted Sadie’s kid birthday party with 6 other kids from church and their families. The theme was a “fancy” (costume) party. The kids decorated vests for their dress-up clothes collection, participated in a fancy parade, ate cake with ice cream “parfaits” topped with sprinkles and a cherry, and played “pin the fairy on the flower.” It was a great success! And what does Sadie think of being 4? Her observation is: “My hands look bigger now that I’m four. But the rest of me is about the same.”
Sadie’s kid party was 3 weeks after her birthday for 2 reasons: my prolonged Febraury ”cold” and our vacation in NH over the first week of March. We spent from Mar 1 – 9 in Plymouth, NH sort-of “housesitting” for some church acquaintances. The Shamels, Julia & Diana, and Grammy and Grampy all joined us there for part of our stay. The kids got a lot of attention, Sadie got to sled and dip in the hot-tub almost every day, and Ransom & I got to go out and xcc ski and snowshoe a bit. Frederick didn’t have to ride in a car for over a week, which may have contributed to his overall good mood. He would laugh easily whenever anyone played with him.
Sadie continues to play lots of Uno. She has made the switch to the grown-up version (B-Day gift from Uncle Sam) and we’ve started counting points. The winner gets points equal to the sum of the cards left in the other players hands. So Sadie is adding. She started with something like 20 plus 5, but the other day she figured out 29 and 8. She gets “counting on” and can do it in her head for adding low numbers. Some of the special cards in Uno are worth 20 points. One day Sadie announced she could count by 20’s, and did! I wondered if she could count by 5’s, too. She tried it and missed a couple numbers but by 65 she had figured out the pattern (without any correction) and hit all the rest of the multiples of 5 up to 100.
Sadie continues to read more than she lets on. She makes cards and notes and has added “poop,” “pee,” ”food,” and “guess” to her previous repertoire of words that she writes- “Sadie,” “love,” “Mommy”, “Daddy” (“F” for Frederick), “Julia,” “from”, and “to.” When we read a book about animals yesterday, she read each animal name and then I read the few sentences about the animal. After lamb, Sadie commented, “That’s funny, it has a B at the end.” “Yeah,” I said, “it’s a silent B. English is funny that way. There are other words like that ….” Sadie piped up. ”Like thumb!” she said. “That’s right! How did you know that?!” Turn out she had noticed (and remembered) it herself from the book, “Hand, Hand Fingers Thumb.” I can’t remember the last time we read that book -weeks, even months ago? She’s just soaking this information up like a sponge.
In addition to real reading and writing, Sadie likes to play at both. She likes catalogues and CD books; she calls then her “cookbooks” and she makes up songs to sing from them. The songs can go on and on and often don’t make much sense. I find them easy to tune-out as background noise. But a close listen can be fuel a good laugh. Examples: A song called “Faces” had a part that went like this, “Oh, baby faces are so pretty … faces … a baby’s face is like an iris; like a potato, a pumpkin….” Okay, I get potato and pumpkin, but an iris? Another one was called “Christmas dinosaur.” I think I copied this down right: “Go to sleep my Christmas dinosaur; It’s not Christmas anymore; Wake up for Christmas on the North Shore ….”
Sadie also likes to write books. We constantly have to fold and staple pages together for her. She prefers that her books have exactly 20 pages. Often they are picture books but sometimes she fills pages with horizontal squiggles, her version of cursive handwriting. The back cover of her books always has “About the Author” She draws a box, sketches a person inside, and then puts squiggles of writing next to and below it. A picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s how cute this is:
Sadie has some ambitious career goals. She wants practice 4 different professions, each on a different day of the week. The other 3 days she’ll be home. The 4 things she wants be are a paleontologist, an astronaut, a nurse, and a woodworker. How you can be an astronuat on Tuesday and a paleontologist on Thursday (she wants to do her favorites on “preschool days”), I’m just not sure, but I sure hope it works out for her!
Sadie continues to love little “goonkster, doomper, boomper, Frederick,” as she often call him. Recently she wondered aloud if maybe she and Frederick would get married to each other. I got the impression she was thinking, “he’s a boy, and I love him …” and I was utterly charmed. I told her she didn’t need to marry Frederick since they are already family and have a special relationship. A few days later she wondered who she wouldmarry. I told her that lots of people don’t even know the person they will marry until they are grown up. “Like Daddy and I didn’t even know each other until we were 18,” I said. She digested this information for a minute. “But 18 is still a kid,” she countered. Further questioning revealed that she considers 20 to be the age at which one becomes a grown-up.
I recently read a book about 4-year-old (“Your 4 Year-Old: Wild & Wonderful”) and what sticks in my head most is that 4 is an age of extremes: “I love soymilk. I hate soymilk in my hot chocolate.” It is fun to hear the enthusiasm of the “love” statements, but confusing when Sadie seems to contradict herself, loving something one day and hating it the next. It is clear that we have entered the four-year-old stage, with much to love … and some challenges, too.
