rudderless

Four!!

Today she goes to bed as a full-fledged four-year-old. Wow that went by really fast.

We had a great weekend with freezing cold weather, the Cinderella ballet at the Miami Ballet Opera House (wow!), a helium tank and a ton of balloons, two butterfly pinatas, and a pink cake. Her favorite gifts were the fairy wand and the satin ballet shoes with ribbons. And she wore her new red pajamas for a solid 48 hours straight. A great weekend to be four.

Four years ago tonight I was eating eggplant parmigiana, trying to hear LOST over the din of the hospital nurses. I remember being so enamored of her, and so terribly scared all at once. Not scared of anything more than the simple fact that she was no longer connected to me. I’d never know what she thought. I’d never have all the answers to her questions. Scared that she’d one day be four. FOUR!

I wrote this letter to her when I was twenty-one weeks pregnant:
Dear Little One-

It’s the end of week twenty-one, and I’m finally starting to show you off. My insatiable appetite has returned, and what surely must be the coolest thing in the world is just starting to occur- you’re flipping and kicking all day long. You react to our gentle pushes on my belly. Your daddy’s voice will wake you and you flip over to say hello. It must be sheer heaven in there- warm, nearly weightless pleasure. We’ll try to make it heaven out here, but I don’t know if it ever gets that good again.

Last night on the Daily Show, John Stuart suggested that his son’s first words were going to be, “Dad, what the f***?,” like everything they’d been doing was wrong to this point. Something tells us you’re happy- whether it’s the steak fajitas, the new Coldplay album, or the cheers for Big Papi, we don’t know. We hope you’re happy. We’ll never be rich, but we promise you everything you need and most of what your heart desires. We promise you’ll be the only kid at preschool happy to take a toy drill and scuba mask to show-and-tell. You’ll know how to crimp an electrical connection and mend a garden hose, how to bleed a fuel line and mend a headsail before any of the other kids!!

We promise to introduce you to the finer pleasures too—music, good homecooked food, woodstoves, a little wine with dinner, riding on trains, playing with dogs, sleeping past noon . . . There’s much to see out here- stars at night, the woods (your woods) in Maine, enough books to keep you reading for a lifetime. So it’s not half bad. Your father promises too, never to turn off your flashlight when you read under the covers, and never to take the fuzzy puppy out of your bed. That stuff makes it all seem worthwhile. And we want you to know all of that joy our parents imparted to us.

We love you Sophia Anne. We can’t wait to see you..

It’s funny how much rings true already. The puppy isn’t a real one yet, but he’s fuzzy, and we’d never dare take Herbert out of her bed.

She has a series of pretend games we play where she goes to a class for the first time and when I ask her name, she invariably says, “My name’s Sophia Anne Landrum, but everyone calls me Sophie.” Exactly what I imagined when I wrote that letter four years ago. Exactly.