Grandma Says: Stay a Baby as Long as You Can

Last night at midnight our family baby turned three and, some would say, became a baby no more. But when I look back! By the time his mom turned three I was treating her as if she were a combination Teaching Assistant and Counselor-in-Training, so much older did she seem than that new little package we held in our arms, swaddled tight against a case of colic so horrid I used to climb on top of the clothes dryer with her, its roaring tumble being about the only thing that could soothe her.Really, three-year-olds are still babies, even though they can talk. That oldest child of mine, mother to CurlyTop here? Here's how she made sense of her sense of disappointment at being nudged aside by a newcomer: “Sometimes when I miss my nap I don’t love the baby that much,” she said one day and that was months before she turned three. As for Baby Colic, at three she was still sucking her thumb with all the relish of a man smoking a fine cigar - and kept on sucking it right through kindergarten, sneaking over to her cubby for secret sessions among the hats and jackets. It’s true that their little brother appeared in the kitchen the morning of his third birthday and refused his customary bottle of cold chocolate milk.  “I’m three,” he said. “I don’t drink from a bottle anymore,” the implication being that he was past all that  - though not, as I recall, past stuffing a bright plastic bead up his nose  few weeks later  just because it seemed to fit so nicely. (Now there was one long night in the ER!)There will be a party later today and all we busy grownups will stop our mulching and our weeding, our ironing and our cooking  and head over to their little house in the woods and spend a few hours with him and his sweet  big brother and their parents, just watching them play in the warm spring sun.