Dear Jacob: November 2007

Dear Jacob,

November seemed to go on forever. You've been four for an entire month now and you use this being four as a reason for everything. "I didn't cry at all because I'm four now!" You declare with almost a whole hand's worth of fingers in the air.

You've also been kind of bossy. Daddy takes you down to the basement a lot to work on little projects and you think you're so cool getting into the big time stuff with him. One time recently I was coming down into the basement with a huge laundry basket and I bumped into the pole running from the ceiling to the floor. "See, that's why you can't be on construction sites!" you started to scold me. You do have an extreme amount of confidence of 'construction sites', but that's actually warranted. You've been using real hammers and nails since you were two and I can't remember you ever getting yourself on the thumb like I tend to do. At MamMa and Papa's you've got this one board on the bottom of a door frame that Papa lets you hammer nails into all day long. I'll be upstairs doing something and I know that as long as I can hear the constant "bang, bang" of the hammer, you're all right down there.

Your dad and I joke about how when you grow up you'll be the next Bob Villa or something and we picture ourselves sitting for an interview and we'll be explaining how from the time you were two, tools were all you cared about, etc, etc. - just like the Olympic athletes who learned to swim at two or started hitting home runs at five. I think we also both hope you'll have some athlete in you too though.

This last month though, you declared your first when-I-grow-up-I-want-to-be statement. You want to be an 'electric man'. Part of this future hope is that you want to be able to install a traffic light in front of our house so that no more deer get hit on the busy road. You'd also like to put up a deer crossing sign by our house as well. You were really affected by the deer that got hit in front of our house in October. You've been obsessed with death since then, but you already were a little bit before that. You have this beautiful picture of Heaven in your mind. All of the people we've ever mentioned the death of are there. My father, Daddy's grandfather, Bartie, the deer that got hit, and most recently, Chris's horses. You know Chris, Alley lets Bart up on her back so that he can ride around and see better. They're friends.

Another thing you've been super into lately is cleaning. Cleaning or assisting with any kind of housework you can. A few weeks ago we were at MamMa's house waiting for them to get home. I was upstairs doing something and suddenly heard the water running downstairs. I didn't think it could be a good sign, but when I arrived in the kitchen I found you, wearing rubber gloves, soapy sponge in hand, taking it to the dirty dishes in the sink. You looked at me with a big smile and said, "MamMa will be so happy I did her dishes for her!" Talk about initiative. You regularly do the dishes now, ask to wash the kitchen floor, sort laundry & fold it without being asked to do so. Strange little boy.

And the dedication with which you carry out these activities is unreal. You'll go outside to rake leaves and won't stop for and hour. You answer the phone with unyielding persistence - and you do it well, only sometimes going on for five minutes about what job you're currently working on while the poor person on the other end kindly waits for an adult.

To balance out all this sweetness, you do display your fair share of angry outbursts. We'll be walking across a parking lot and someone in the distance will beep or a car alarm will go off and you verbally honk back. "Stop it!!!" you scream to the offender. There's also the 'smack talk': "We have to put Mango in the dumpster!", "I'm gonna smack this shirt out of here!", "I don't like my clothes, they're all cwappy." And the speed, you're obsessed with speeding, as in verbally abusing people who you think are speeding. This comes from sitting at the window in our house watching the cars go by, and sometimes seeing them get pulled over by the police. But sometimes you are the offender. One time you were riding your tricycle around the circle in our house and you stopped to yell to the imaginary police officer. "No aplice man, you're not gonna give me a speeding ticket! I'm going through the red light!"

Where is all the anger coming from? I've always taken my cues from you, gauged my behavior according to how I see you acting. So it naturally occurs to me that if you are behaving very loud and very negatively, that I need to change something within myself to set a better example for you. But then the other night I was watching a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond, it was the episode where Michael puts together a little book for a school assignment and titles it 'The Angry Family'. Everyone has to go to counseling, and they're all concerned they're messing up their child, etc. Then in the end, in response to someone's comment about the book, Michael says, "Yeah, I like that show." So the book wasn't even about them at all and they could relax in the knowledge that they weren't screwing up their kid. Well I just don't know how to tell the difference anymore between something that is going to mess you up and something that I should just let roll off my shoulders.

But if you've been displaying some anger lately, it doesn't even compare to the sensitivity that you still exude every day of your life. We still can't watch Curious George (the movie theater version) because it's too scary. Papa was watching TV with you a while back and when I found out it was Happy Feet you were watching, my radar went up. It's just a kids' movie, right? Any kind of major motion picture, whether it's marketed for kids or not, has to have some kind of climactic part. And that kind of drama is just too much for sensitive souls like us. If you ever get over this, great, but if you don't, I won't be surprised. I still get mad at my parents for taking me to see Beetlejuice when I seven. Bambi? Forget it. I'll never be able to watch that damn movie. I'm so sorry I made you stay at MamMa and Papa's late last Saturday night to watch Beethoven's 4th. It was a stupid idea, and I should know better than to encourage you to watch a movie on the Disney Channel. You spent the whole movie running out of the room screaming because the dog was not with his family. Didn't matter that he was happy and with nice people, he wasn't where he belonged. And now, thanks to Disney, you know what a gun is. You're still questioning me about that movie and getting the worried little look and a furrowed brow.

Anyway, this month's entry is very long, and very late. I'm sorry to the readers for the great length of it, and the lateness I can only attribute to the other thing that's been going on in our house this month. Come June, we're going to have a new little baby in the house. You are so excited about this, and I am so tired. So tired. It's been hard to motivate myself to do much of anything. Perhaps next month I'll have my energy back and some cute stories about all the nice things you're doing for the little person growing inside of me.

Love,

Mommy