My "Little Big Kid"

I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that my baby is going to be three years old in a few months. Of course to Henry himself, babyhood is already a distant memory. "I'm not a baby," he'll tell you, "I'm a little big kid."

That's about as apt an assessment as anyone could offer for a boy who will clutch his stuffed dog and cry for me to hold him one minute, and then the next minute calmly inquire of his father, "How was your day today, Daddy? Was there traffic?"

Henry is sweet, and thoughtful, and cuddly, and adventurous, and smart. He is constantly cracking us up with his exclamations and observations. A few good ones from the past week:

"Mama! I fell down and hurt my schnoz!"
(upon opening his Hanukkah present) "Race cars! I can't believe it!"

Henry had all the parents in his Play Place class rolling last week when in the midst of a story about cows he yelled out, "We saw jumping cows at the Oakland Zoo!" (Editorial note: Sadly we did not, in fact, see jumping cows at the Oakland Zoo. Now THAT would be something!).

Henry is a second child. He definitely doesn't get the one-on-one attention that his older brother got there for a couple years. You'd think that this might make him slower to pick up on certain things. If anything, however, the opposite appears to be true. Henry is living proof that one-on-one attention is completely overrated. This kid learned the alphabet on his own, and surprised us all by singing it in its entirety one day (see video clip). Sometimes, the depth and breadth of his knowledge is truly astonishing and I'm left scratching my head and wondering, "Where in the hell did he learn that?"

One great example of this was a couple weeks ago when Henry asked me to trace his hands to make a turkey. We did this and then he wanted me to draw the turkey's face. I thought I had done a passable job, but he sternly reminded me, "Mama, you forgot the wattle." Wattle?!! Where did that come from??!!

There's also been evidence that all of a sudden Henry is starting to consider some deeper issues. He finds certain cartoons and movies "scary" in a way that his brother never did. He also stopped me in my tracks the other day by asking out of the blue, "Why were the bad guys in the synagogue?" I just about had a heart attack wondering if my 2 1/2-year-old was asking about the Nazis, but then quickly realized that he must be referring to the Hanukkah story. We talked about the ancient Syrians and left the Nazis for another day.

Little "Hen" is full of surprises, and it is such a joy watching him grow from a baby to a boy.