Or four years minus two months. The boy has become quite adept at informing people that he’s going to be [this many fingers] old on his birthday.

If I had to distill this past month down to two words, they would be singing and bunnies. I have been woken up a good five out of seven days each week by a small child burrowing under the covers with me, then singing such classic hits as “Little Bunny Foo-Foo,” the alphabet song, a little preschool ditty called “Ducks Like Rain,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” “Old Macdonald,” “Five Little Ducks,” and various little songs of his own devising. And perhaps it was the Easter thing, but he’s become obsessed with rabbits: pictures, stuffed ones, hopping around like one. He started carrying around the small white bunny my gran sent him to keep BunBun company, and just acquired a silky-soft black one for Easter whom he calls Blackie-Whitey, or Blackie for short (very inventive is my almost-four-year-old).

Ceri and Scott lent us the breathtaking Planet Earth series of nature documentaries, and we’ve been enjoying them immensely. They’re far beyond the nature shows of our youth. Of course, they do tell similar stories, and so the boy was introduced to the cycle of life rather graphically. “Why is that wolf chasing those deer?” he wanted to know. So we explained that it was chasing the caribou (ahem) because he was hungry. “RUN, CARIBOU!” he yelled at the screen. And so we talked about the fact that wolves aren’t good or bad, that this is just the way things are. We had to revisit the concept when the wild dogs chased the antelope, and the shark chased the seal (in graphic slow motion), but he eventually got it. He loves the different climates and landscapes, and all the animals, and he especially loves the planet rise in the opening title sequence.

This past month has seen a huge explosion in alphabet and letter recognition, complete with drawing letters and reading. Words he can absolutely read include Liam, Mama, Dada, cat, car, cello, train, school, and lesson. (Why have I not shown him how to write ‘book’ yet?) He demonstrates amusing logo recognition, too, pointing out Chapters, Zellers, Best Buy, and the toy store with great enthusiasm as we pass them in the car or see them in flyers. One morning we were cuddling in bed together and he started describing drawing letters. It took me a few moments to understand what he was talking about, but I clued in somewhere around the second letter. He described drawing the strokes necessary to write out his name, and I was wide awake by the end of it, at which point I gave him a huge hug. Being able to actually hold a pencil and draw it out is one thing; being able to describe it abstractly without the accompanying physical motions is pretty stupendous, in my opinion. Especially at stupid o’clock in the morning. He’s been able to write his name for a while, but now he does it clearly without prompting. He has become fascinated with the difference between upper and lowercase letters, although he’s making the classic mistake of confusing the lowercase D and B. He’s very proud of being able to write his name in lowercase letters and understands that the first letter of a name is capitalized. Serifs frustrate him, because he traces them and thinks they’re extra bars or ascenders/descenders and guesses the letter in question incorrectly, or asks what letter it is because it doesn’t match the twenty-six he knows.

The biggest new experience this month was without question riding the metro, or the ‘underground train’ as he calls it. He loved watching from the platform for the lights coming down the tunnel, watching the trains passing in the other direction, looking at the art in the stations while people got off and on; the entire experience was exciting. I’ll be taking him with me to a downtown meeting next week just so he can have another ride. The other exciting new thing is the Lego Star Wars game we bought for the Xbox, which he just adores. He figured out how to make the characters run around, jump, and attack in no time at all. Playing in co-op mode is a bit of a challenge because he’s likely to run off in the opposite direction, and the characters are yoked within a certain distance, but he’ll get better. This month’s awesome new film was Bolt.

One of the more curious things he’s been doing is pretending he’s Maggie. I know most kids pretend they’re animals at various times, but how many of them have a default pretend of being Mama’s now-deceased pet? (Not that he pretends he’s the zombie feline. You know what I mean.)
Having seen how sensitive he is about toys being forgotten in rotation, I suspect he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to forget her, or allow us to forget her. There’s a loyalty there that’s really touching. And he’s generous to a fault; in fact, he sometimes is overly generous with his lunch at school, giving it to others instead of eating it. Of course, this isn’t much of a concern for us, because he regularly eats three breakfasts. This kid isn’t anywhere near starving. He’s too cool for that.