Dear Noah,
You turned 4 years and 3 months old 5 days ago. It has been a crazy month, but things are calming down now, at least for a moment.
This month, you’ve become obsessed with fast food restaurants. This is a little bit embarrassing at after-school pickup, when you have loudly asked if we can go to Burger King every single day this week. You go to a school, after all, where parents are asked not to bring cake for birthdays, but a “healthy snack.” And when I say no, you correctly whine that we never go to Burger King.
(We do occasionally go to the Other Big Fast Food Chain and you are a very big fan of the dragon toys, yes 2 of them, that you got with meals there.)
You are also solidly in the developmental phase where you are aware that you might be being judged, and maybe found wanting in some way, so you announce multiple times each day, “Don’t look at me!”
That one is tricky. Sometimes you say it in the middle of the room, or while blocking a hallway we are trying to traverse. Other times you say it after we’ve spent 5 minutes nagging you into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and another 2 trying to get you to actually brush them. We are suspicious that if we stop looking at you, you will immediately go back to playing with some toy instead of brushing your teeth.
You are right on the edge of reading. You can sound out words, but you get impatient after 1 or 2. You’ve memorized the Star Wars book we bought you, and nightly “read” it by reciting the text from memory — with about 90% accuracy, and a little extra prompting near the end. You are so sweetly shy and proud of yourself for “reading” the whole book “all by myself with no help.”
I think you might be developing into a serious intellectual geek. (Note: I don’t say this as a bad thing!)
The reason is mainly because you get unbelievably impatient with people who tell you things you already know. For the non-geek population, this is often called “making conversation.” We know that you know it is raining, for example. The socially correct response to, “Wow, it looks really wet out this morning,” is not “I know that already!” but rather something like, “It sure does!” or “I like rain so I can splash in the puddles.”
One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, explains the difference between young geeks and older geeks in his book Cryptonomicon. Young geeks, he says, consider declarative sentences acts of aggression, implying that you are telling them something they don’t already know. Older geeks know, either that you are making conversation, or that sometimes people just need to say things out loud in order to think them through.
You also love to tell jokes; so far, I’m sorry to say, none of them have actually made sense. (Why did the chicken cross the eyeball? To get to the other eyeball!) That doesn’t stop you from telling them with enthusiasm, or us from laughing.
Today, you started T-Ball. This Mommy is so proud and excited. We took pictures of the two of you getting ready to go this morning. She says you were the fastest 4 year old running the bases during the warm-up, and that you were also faster than lots of the 5 year olds. You glowed with pride when she told me that.
We love you, Noah.
love,
That Mommy
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