Happy Birthday Charlie!

Charlie’s birthday was on Friday, and now my little man is three!

He has been a wonderful 2 year old, but as I recall from Alannah, three was when the naughty step really came into use quite frequently. I think a two year old boy is one of the loveliest creatures in the world. Especially my one!

We’ve been practicing using scissors, but every time we do he picks them up and says ‘I’m going to cut your beautiful hair Mummy.’ I tell him no, he must never cut anyone’s hair, and he just grins. When I did get my hair cut earlier this week, he looked at me in shock. ‘Mummy! Your beautiful hair!’ Was he upset that it was shorter or that I hadn’t let him do it?

He likes to watch me get ready in the morning. When he hears the hair-dryer he runs into my room, climbs onto the bed and under the covers. He tells me what to do next – ‘now dry it with the hairbrush. Now do make-up. Now squish-squish (perfume). Now me.’ I have an empty perfume bottle filled with water that Alannah and I used to play princesses, but it’s Charlie that wants a spritz now.

He received a bicycle for his birthday. Alannah was four when she got hers and it was a struggle for her to get co-ordinated enough to pedal and move forward. He jumped on and took off, a year younger than she was. He’s the same at the playground, fearless and capable of scaling the biggest climbing frames. Of course, at 9 months he was climbing the stairs when my back was turned…

He loves the garbage truck (called the bin lorry in Ireland) and runs to the window every Tuesday to watch. The bin men are his friends and wave to him each week. Since he got a playmobil bin lorry for Christmas, he takes it to the window each Tuesday to show them.

I run a mother and baby singing group, and Marcus comes along to make the tea and coffee and help with buggies, etc. Charlie comes too. During the singing they play in another room, then come in to do drinks. Charlie goes up to each mother and asks if they want a piece of cake. If I don’t stop him, he would grab the pieces of cake and distribute them into each woman’s lap.

He loves Caitlyn, and often says to me ‘She’s so cute! What a sweet baby!’ His older sister is his arch-nemesis though, and the only recipient of a Charlie’s teeth-shaped bruise. It recently dawned on him that he’s in the middle between two sisters. I wonder what that will mean to him in the future. He has such a strong personality, I don’t think he will get lost in the family.

I have read that boys are closest to their mothers for the first seven years, then they shift to being closer to their fathers until they are 13 or 14, when they start to look for mentors outside of the family. So I only have a few more years of his mostly undivided devotion – he loves his dad, and the Car movie, and bin lorries, but I get the kisses and the snuggles and the sleepy ‘I love you Mommy’ when he climbs into my bed in the night.
I love you too, my Charlie. Happy birthday.

Sorry blogosphere for subjecting you to this gush of maternal devotion to my little boy!

Here are some other things I've written about him, in my now-defunct Xanga blog:

Christmas poem

Mommy's Boy

First Birthday

Second Birthday

And some pictures from his last birthday on our family blog, where you can see a very pregnant me (one week overdue and VERY grumpy) in the video. Which means in a few days I will bore the WWW with stories about my sweet little baby!