Doodle

Tomorrow my baby will be five.

To say that I am awash in nostalgia is an understatement.

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**Edited to add that the song is “Lullaby” by the Dixie Chicks.

To give you an idea of how my weekend went, I’ll tell you that I spent Saturday night searching for my copy of “The Strong-Willed Child” because I was clearly in need of some serious parenting assistance.

I finally found it in the bottom drawer of my nightstand along with an issue of People magazine dated August 4, 2003. It’s the issue I brought to the hospital when I went in to deliver Caroline.

I keep it for sentimental reasons and also because the cover story is about Angelina Jolie, long before she ensnared Brad Pitt and had fifty-eight children.

Anyway, I originally purchased “The Strong-Willed Child” when Caroline was about ten months old. Oh, what a sweet kid I was.

I thought my ten month old was strong-willed and was all like “Help me, Dr. Dobson. My baby will stand up and hold on to her crib railing for hours and refuses to lie down! What on earth do I do about this huge problem?”

I’d like to go back and slap some sense into myself. Rookie.

Now I’d be like, “Hang on to those crib rails all you want, sweet girl. You’ll get tired and fall down eventually. It’s called GRAVITY.”

Caroline will turn five in one week. And, honestly, if the last three weeks have been any indication of how five is going to look, then let me say for the record that I am really going to miss four.

Four has been mostly delightful. Five is starting to seem like a visit from an obnoxious relative who eats all your chocolate and then kicks the dog.

On Saturday she threw a fit of epic proportions filled with more drama than Scarlett O’Hara fleeing Atlanta. I’d like to say that I handled it with dignity, grace and patience, but I was fresh out of all those things. I’d had it.

In fact, P had to send us to our separate corners so that we could both calm down.

It was ugly.

And it made me feel like a failure.

I spent most of Saturday night trying to figure out where I’ve gone wrong. Am I too hard on her? Am I not hard enough? Am I not teaching her the right things?

Then, about midnight, I heard her little voice over the baby monitor.

“Mama? Mama?”

As I walked in her room, she immediately stood up on her bed, reached for me and said, “Mama? I love you.”

I held her close, breathed in the scent of her damp hair, and said, “I love you, too. You’re the light of my life.”

And for that moment she was ten months old again, not holding on to crib rails for stability, but to me.

That’s my job. Even when it’s hard.

Even when I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.

About two weeks ago I got my hair cut and, for once, I actually liked it from the moment I walked out of the salon, which practically never happens.

Well, I say I liked it. I liked the haircut. I wasn’t so crazy about the way my hairdresser curled my bangs under with a curling iron.

It was a styling error.

But my haircut isn’t the point.

While she was cutting my hair, she asked me about Caroline, specifically how I discipline Caroline when she acts up or does something wrong.

And here’s what I said, “Lately I haven’t had to discipline her that much. The year she was three was really hard because she tested me on everything, but NOW THAT SHE’S ALMOST FIVE I rarely have to discipline her. She knows I’m serious when I give her a look or get a certain tone in my voice and she’ll usually do whatever I’ve asked her to do.”

A few days later that statement proved to be a lesson in irony.

It’s like I opened the vault of child-rearing fate and yelled “THIS WHOLE THING IS SO EASY! I HAVE FIGURED IT ALL OUT!”

Big mistake.

The last two weeks have been filled with more meltdowns and drama than an episode of “The Bachelor”.

In fact, at one point last week, I put her in timeout and when I went in her room I began to explain to her that Mama is the boss and she can’t talk back to me. She looked at me and said, “If you say you’re the boss one more time, I’m going to get myself so worked up that I don’t know what I’ll do.”

At which point I sent a flurry of prayers upwards to heaven in the hope that God will sustain me for the next twenty years.

I began to countdown the days until school starts on the calendar because every day ended with me feeling so tired and frustrated from fighting one battle after another ALL DAY LONG.

Then, the night before last, I was programming our DVR to record various shows throughout the week. At that moment, it dawned on me that in a few weeks Caroline will start Kindergarten. For the last five years, as our tastes have graduated from “Sesame Street” to “Pinky Dinky Doo” to “Tom & Jerry”, the majority of our mornings have been spent snuggling on the couch watching T.V. together before we start our day. And now we’re about to enter into the world of schedules and alarm clocks.

Mornings that will often consist of “NO YOU CANNOT WEAR THAT AND HURRY UP OR WE’LL BE LATE!”

It’s not like I haven’t known this was coming. I’ve been aware of Kindergarten since the day I brought her home from the hospital, but its never loomed on the horizon like it does at this moment.

And as the full realization of that hit me the other night, something inside me began to ache more than a little. I’m not ready to send her off to a big wide world where she’ll carry her own lunch tray and pick out what kind of milk she wants. Of course she doesn’t like milk, but that’s not the point.

She’s ready. I know she’s ready. It’s evident in everything she does these days; from her fierce independence to the way she breezed through the workbook I bought filled with exercises called Kindergarten basics. She is my social butterfly and she’s ready to fly.

And I have to let her.

Then yesterday, in the midst of my emotional “Sunrise, Sunset” breakdown, she woke up congested with a low-grade fever. She was operating at about half of her usual energy level and was content to just cuddle up with me in bed where we spent most of the day watching movies and playing Candyland. In spite of the fact that she didn’t feel great, it was one of the best days we’ve had in weeks.

We were both content to just be in that moment, to enjoy each other and a day filled with just the two of us. No errands to run, no place we had to be, no pressure to find an activity.

I felt like it was God’s little gift to me, to give us a reason to slow down and just be still for a moment before Kindergarten comes to call.