Dear Friends and Family,
When I get a few seconds to contemplate, I get all teary at how it all goes so fast. I used to not-understand people who felt this way: who felt nostalgic. “Good thing you grew up, young lady!” is about the only thing I have to say now, to my formerly impudent young self, so I can get back to the task of wiping tears from my eyes and finding a few seconds a day to appreciate this flying-by life. Now that I live in a beautiful, healthy, and gorgeously comfortable house, I am also ready to get soft, and for life to slow down again, thankyouverymuch. Why can’t things be slow like when you’re little, and time is not noticeable, and there’s just so much more of it? How can it be that my midlife-not-a-crisis baby boy is already FIVE??
Kai is in many ways our slowest child, and by that I am not referring to his powers of cognition, which are very quick indeed. What I mean is, Kai contemplates the world in bite size chunks, at the speed he deems appropriate, and takes action accordingly. For instance: he determined at a young age that while sliding on slides and riding on bicycles were obviously fun for many other children, he himself wasn’t at all interested in “getting past” the healthy ambivalence he felt toward those activities. He didn’t ruminate; he just had many many other things he wanted to spend his time doing instead. This past year he learned that he LOVES slides, actually, and wasted no time enjoying them at every opportunity. But while he learned to ride a two wheel pedal bike about a year and a half ago, he spent the past eighteen months almost completely uninterested in using his bicycle. Maybe next year will be the year of the bicycle! Or not. Kai takes these things as they come.
Kai is remarkably articulate and sometimes makes me burst out laughing even when he fails at his primary goal of Convincing Me Otherwise. Kai’s year has been stressful for all the reasons our entire family’s has, but the biggest source of stress for him was that Jem went away for five whole months between January and June. Kai sobbed for so long after we dropped Jem off at Kroka, that I believe he aged ten years in one day. During Jem’s entire absence, Kai let it quietly be known that the situation was AWFUL, really, and that there was no refutation of the point: we should NEVER allow Jem to go away again; that he, Kai, would next time accompany Jem if he ever had to go away; and that five months was a TERRIBLY long time to wait for a big brother to come home.
By the time Jem finally came back, Kai actually had grown up a lot, and had missed his brother for so long in the process that his entire demeanor had become Slightly Sad. He was MUCH happier with Jem home, even though he didn’t cling to him constantly. In some ways, they spend less time together than they did before. It’s not that he and Jem don’t get along now, because they do, but in this heartbreaking way that maybe is only noticed by their mother, in their relationship this year is a reflection of how time stays put for no one, and the only constant is change.
**SNIFF***SNIFF***SOOOOOBBBBBBB!**
[Ahem. Sorry about that!]
Kai’s adoration of the written word has changed form over the years, but in no way diminishes. He adores books, now appreciates having chapter books and fiction read to him, as well as more complex and longer nonfiction books, both with pictures and without. His own reading and spelling and handwriting are increasing naturally, as are his math and chess skills as coached by Jem. Kai really is a proverbial sponge, learning all the time and with such ease in so many ways.
The biggest hardship in his life recently - and the only injury that occurred during our house build - is that Kai fractured his foot when something heavy and wooden fell on it. Without dwelling for long on the details that make Kai’s mother slightly woozy, Kai went ahead and took care of his injured body in his very own careful way. While the doctor said he’d be ready to walk on it in three weeks, Kai at that point said in no uncertain terms that his foot was not ready yet, and that was that. He asked why he’d been given a boot and crutches “when they’re not even USEFUL for anything??” …and he decided that crawling was a much better option for his personal locomotion, and refused to use them at all. Now he’s just about walking again, and he’s doing it strictly at Kai Speed.
Kai and Miri are almost, although not quite yet, able to finally/regularly meet in between their sibling squabbles…and play together. Their mother is heartily looking forward to this eventuality!
——
Being a Reliable helper is unfortunately not Kai’s strong suit. He does love to help in general…but when it’s not in his current want-to-do list, he - in the time honored tradition of children everywhere - likes to see if he can get his mother to just give up and do his chore herself, since it would be WAY easier for her to do so, even while of course she regretfully would not EVER take that easy way out because then she would commit the cardinal sin of parenting, which is to “be inconsistent,” something that creates actual childhood psychological trauma, not to mention a spoiled child who will grow up into an adult with no practical skills. Never, would any self respecting parent be inconsistent on purpose. Ah, but it would be SO much easier to do all the chores myself, thinks Kai’s mother…sometimes she lets herself fantasize about the short term wonder it would be to just get all the chores done this way, hearing no complaints nor bickering, long term regrets be damned…
——
Kaiisms:
Looking forward to spring, Kai remembers the flowers called “Sucklehoney”
Kai, can you please do your chore, and take out the compost: “…Yeah, but that would be too much of a hassle!”
“Painting is my best friend.”
Concerning a new library book about mars: “It’s so cool I can barely stop looking at it!”
Do you know how much a hundred is? “Yup. A big number!”
During our trip to Wegmans, I was in the bathroom when I heard a tuneful, unmistakable voice singing “Building Bridges” from inside one of the stalls. Eliza must have brought Kai over right after I came into the bathroom. I didn’t know anyone else was in here! I said. “This was the rest of my pee,” Kai informed me happily, as he emerged and danced over to to the sink and unfolded the step stool, explaining as he did, “I LOVE these step stools!” A young Mennonite teen was at the next sink, smiling at Kai’s concert and enthusiasm, and when he turned and noticed her, he got suddenly bashful and hid his head shyly. After he dried his hands, he went running out of the bathroom. “Eliza,” he said, “Eliza!!! There was a beYOOtiful lady in the bathroom!”
Kai, I have a bunch of compost that’s ready for you! “Well, I’m not ready for it!”
Narrating his way to the trash can in a museum: “You can go back here! Now you’re under the steps…and then you find the garbage!”
“Do you know what kind of circle this is?” Oval. “No, it’s an ellipse! Cuz it’s elliptical.”
“Is Jupiter that big just to fit its Great Red Spot?”
See above; as mothers must assign new chores, in order to gain the requisite number of gray hairs, children must slowly accumulate new chores, because growing older requires More Responsibilities and therefore of course even MORE gray hairs for their mothers. Kai can’t even think up an original new complaint about his New Additional Chore of wiping the table, though: “It’s…too much HASSLE!”
"Which way does the hat go on?" I don’t think it matters which way it goes. "It matters!" Kai says immediately. "...Cuz otherwise I look like Mickey Mouse!" (This was funny both because once I looked I could see he was right, and also because I have no idea how he knows who Mickey Mouse is.)
Playing outside, pointing to his chest: “I hear something thumping!”
“I wrote a ‘does not equal’ sign on the butter!”
“I’m getting strong! By doing my chores and going on playdates and going outside.”
Delivering a new drawing to me: “Your art is here!”
“Mama, you should try driving to Jenny’s. It would take YEARS! Almost till dark. Jenny and Brett played war with me - one of their girls knew how, so they could play.”
Movies are in general not Kai’s favorite thing, because they are mostly all too scary. This was especially true last year, and very especially concerning How to train your Dragon, which he explained thusly: “This book is wonderful! The painter is wonderful at painting the pictures. I like EVERY part of this book. The book is MUCH better than the movie, though!”
Did I brush your tongue? (Shakes head) “…NOR my teeth!”
Kai, drawing “money” and handing it to papa. Wow, so many checks for a hundred and eighty eight dollars! “That’s cuz I don’t know how to write any others!”
——
Saying goodbye to Jem in NH was so very sad. Kai didn’t have even a moment of wishful denial. “I guess I’ll sleep awone,” he said dolefully. He then spent two days being totally annoying to everyone, trying to take out his sadness on making his family as annoyed as possible. Then he got down on his knees and sobbed and sobbed when his Jemmy walked into the woods to join his expedition group.
The mom of another participant tried to make Kai feel better but unfortunately did not quite find comforting words: “I didn’t think I was upset before, but then your two little girls started crying, and your little one is crying, and really _I_ should be crying, because at least you have other children! I have to go home now and I have NOBODY there, just me and the dog, hear that, little guy? So really I should be crying much _more_ than you, and you should feel sorry for me instead of you.” Kai looked at her through his tears just once, with the most supremely unimpressed look, and did not answer at all.
Later, when he had stopped sobbing and talked with Eliza for a while, Kai said uncertainly, “it will be a short time till Jem’s home?” Then checking with Ivy, he asked her - how long would it be, again? “…It doesn’t SOUND like a short time, actually!” Kai concluded sadly.
For the next five months, Kai wrote Jem heartbreaking letters that said, “Dear Jem, I miss you. I wish you would come back. Love, Kai”
——
“You should call Jem and tell him I got up to one hundred nine! I got so far in counting!”
“I’m NOT stomping! I’m just hopping.”
“Why do days go around in a circle?”
Do you know what pressure is? “Yeah! Like when you push on something.”
“I am four years old, and I’m THIS tall [taps the top of his own head]. I would NOT fit in that sleep suit!”
The little stuffed turtles have names according to their colors: “Dese are named, ‘inside a tree.’ Dese are ‘almost dark.’ Dese are ‘Sunrise’!”
Grounds for a very speedy quick stop at a luckily nearby rest area: “I gotta go to the bathroom! My poop is gonna come out! It’s gunnoo!!”
“It should be called a ‘table bigger.’ Why is it called a ‘leaf’?”
Kai Bursts randomly into a verse I had no idea he’d memorized:
“….If a pear gets lost at night
And meets a fox who takes a bite
Will the peat become…a pearwolf?”
“You can’t make five into a triangle …but you can make six!”
“It’s always tomorrow after you sleep!”
Settling in to nurse, a small static shock gets us both, and Kai lifts his head to comment: “ZAP!”
“When I grow up, I’m gonna let my kids bounce on the couch! …it’ll have cushions that are harder.”
“Oh, Miri’s right over here! And she’s not eating anything she shouldn’t eat.”
The world is full of shoddily manufactured balloons, for which it is easier to blame your mother than to accept the reality that such crappy products flood our consumer experience. Or that balloons, even if good quality, STILL don’t last long. “But I want to blow it up again! But you should untie the knot! But you should! But mama!!!!! Waaaahhhhhhhh!!! I don’t WANT it to.” 😭😭
Later that same day: “I’m NEVER gonna have another balloon. I don’t like them.”
Pooping: “I’m done!! I counted to one hundred twenty nine!”
Kai can’t stop laughing at a Calvin and Hobbes strip and all I can make out from his hysterically described description are the words, “Rigatoni Noodles!!”
While Jem was gone, Kai went through an intensive Calvin and Hobbes stage, during which he memorized as many strips as he possibly could, and quite likely managed to sublimate some grief by laughing at Mr. Mosty Toasty, and the wrestle attack scene with Hobbes, which ends with Calvin saying, “…I’ve decided to become an intellectual.” We scanned Calvin and Hobbes pages with my phone, printed them out, and Kai colored them over and over again in a sort of humorous, thoughtful meditation.
——
Then Jeff’s boss died suddenly one morning, and our regular breakfast conversation was shattered. Kai took one look at Jeff’s face, sad and crying, and bolted up to the bedroom. At bedtime, Kai was still processing: “How did a phone call say that David died? ….how did [the boss’ boss] know?” I explained that David’s wife told his boss who told Papa. “I couldn’t eat downstairs,” Kai told me. You mean when we found out? because it felt all weird? …Yeah, it is SO sad, and you could feel that. It can feel…really YUCKY when someone dies! It was those kids’ PAPA who died. It’s so sad. “I can’t think of it!” Kai said loudly, sliding into his sleeping bag. “My body is letting me forget about it.” Whereupon he immediately began making Calvin and Hobbes pouncing sounds and ended with the strip that goes, “…I’ve decided to become an intellectual.” 🥲
——
“Eyes are so tiny! How do they see so much stuff?”
Our entire family shared a terrible stomach flu last winter; the single shred of decency this sickness possessed was that it was over very quickly, after it had purged each family member beyond all possible need. Kai felt well enough after 24 hours to transmogrify as per Calvin and Hobbes into every kind of dinosaur imaginable, plus build a snow fort with Jeff (“I’ll be a brontosaurus through the night now!” Kai told me at bedtime before tucking in to nurse). The next morning he was an argentinosaurus, which, I was told, is a sauropod - and then he was better.
“Huh! It’s already past my frozen banana time!”
Everyone had a great time visiting the zoo in Rochester last winter, and at the very end, when the zoo was closing, Ben took Kai into the elephant house to see if they could find them (they’d been hidden behind the stall before). Kai came running out after and said, “We saw them!!!! We saw the backs of them, and the fronts of them, and LOTS of them!” And then he added, with glee, “I REALLY thought elephants were made up!”
“My non frozen banana time is anytime!”
In a letter that Eliza read aloud to us all, Dorothy noted how everyone at Kroka was learning a lot from Jem about navigation, which was his current “big job”; I heard Kai say under his breath, “Jem is a teacher after all!”
“If Hobbes was about to pounce me, right before he pounced me I’d be OFF.”
“Will a new world come after the sun explodes?”
"But that's NOT right," Kai keeps repeating, brandishing his Calvin and Hobbes book while explaining the logic to Eliza. "P-A-W spells POW! And P-O-W spells paw!" Eliza kept gently arguing her case but finally gave up, and at that moment I had such a clear memory of my little brother, so sure that three times four was eleven: "...But the people who make the flash cards don't know EVERYTHING!"🥰
“I hate winter!” Why do you hate winter? “Because when there’s snow on the ground it covers up all the roses!”
It’s the fifth day of spring! “…Is it close to the time Jem will come back?”
It’s not super nice out. In other words, it’s SUPER not nice out! “…In other words, it’s BAD!”
The relative virtues of two porta potties: “It was disgustinger than this one. It was the disgustingest!”
At the edge of a sea of hens in the chicken coop: “I think they sometimes understand ‘excuse me’”
“It’s very easy to say ‘smeegul.’ You just say ‘seagull’ and then you RUN!”
Out of the mouths of babes: “You didn’t know that we were sliding down the steps on mattresses, because we were doing it while you were GONE so you couldn’t see!”
Doesn’t five months zip by so speedily in a quick letter? Kai’s reunion with Jem, on a super rainy weekend at the extremely loud graduation was overwhelming to all the senses, and when Kai finally got to jump into Jem’s arms, he noted: “You’re so muscley!”
“When I first counted my fingers, I got Eleven fingers, but when I counted again I ended up with ten!”
“Uncle Scrooge in the Donald Duck books is fully rich!”
Watching the garbage collectors load many piles of drywall scraps into the truck: “I didn’t miss any of the smushes except for two!”
After Jem got his driver’s license: “Jem, since you can drive now, can we go to South America??”
“My eyes have circles under them because I woke up too soon!”
Displaying his Halloween costume for the cat: “I went out to show Mac my costume!”
Prior to his fifth birthday, Kai kept commenting every so often, definitively: “I don’t wanna grow up!” Me neither, kiddo, why you got to grow up??
“Nothing takes no time! Some things are really quick, but that’s not as quick as no time.”
“Does nothing plus nothing equal nothing?”
Drawing trees: “I thought these would come out bad, and they just didn’t! …They’re like magic!”
“What makes a ‘th’ sound, like ‘then forget it!’?”
Looking through “Circus Ship” from a new batch of library books: “YES! This is the book I’ve been waiting for all my life!”
After spending most of the afternoon writing in his new writing workbook: “I LOVE learning things! I want Papa to teach me more!!”
The first day wearing his new Myobrace: “I hate it! It’s giving me a heart attack in my mouth!”
——
Something so cute happened one day while I was hanging laundry. Kai was asking about the Titanic and Ivy was answering and suddenly they were having a conversation. My heart swelled with the temporary break in constant arguing, while I basked in the moment: two of my children were getting along!
——
And there you go, a small snapshot of Kai, growing up too quickly for words.
Xoxoxo
Sarabeth