Threenager Summer

It was the best of days; it was the hottest of days…

To have a three-year-old is to be thrust into a yearlong summer—the kind with record-breaking heat waves and furious squalls.

You sweat and you play. You love it and you long for a reprieve. You’re convinced you’ll melt, and you don’t want it to end. You duck for cover when tornadic winds touch down. You eat too many popsicles on the front porch.

In this season of parenting a child with a hankering for autonomy and bursting with so. many. opinions., I feel the heat and intensity of these days.

The words of a Van Morrison song have been echoing through my mind the last couple of months:

These are the days of the endless summer…

These are the days indeed.

These are the days of sloppy whispers in my ear: “I wuv you, Mama.” And these are the days of “Me not like you anymore!” when I limit his daily banana quota.

These are the days of “revenge peeing” in the corner (the term so aptly coined by Daniel). And these are the days of being met by squeals and full-body hugs when we walk in the door.

These are the days of brothers sneaking into bed to read together in the morning. And these are the days when Duplos also function as tiny plastic missiles.

These are the days of cute phrases like “croco-gator” (crocodile + alligator) and “mus-beard” (mustache + beard). And these are the days of meltdowns over the wrong color cereal bowl.

Endless summer. Isn’t that the pinky promise summer makes with us? You realize it’s not true—you know it can’t last forever—but as you wipe ice cream from sticky faces, as mosquitoes feast on bare ankles and fireflies blink languidly in the dusk, you can almost be lulled into believing the calendar page will never turn.

But in these long days of August, I catch a whiff of the changing of seasons.

Will this be the last time I buy a box of overpriced diaper genie refill bags?
Will this be the last time our boy dashes into our bed during a thunderstorm, thinking it’s bad guys?
Will this be the last time I do an emergency potty cleanup in the grocery store?
Will this be the last time I carry a sleep-heavy boy to his bed after a playground date?

“It goes by so fast,” they say. They’re right, of course. But I have no more power to slow down these years than I do to pause the sun in its descent or to delay the approach of autumn.

It seems so obvious, but it hit me like a gut punch today: This is the youngest my kids will ever be.

So what can I do, time-bound creature that I am? I suppose my only recourse is to savor the moments as I can and try to make a truce with the calendar. I’ll resist the longing to fast-forward or rewind or press pause. I’ll do my best to remember as many sweet things as I can, and just enough of the spicy bits to empathize with moms of other threenagers one day.

And maybe this afternoon, when the sun is beating down on us, we’ll sit on the porch and eat another popsicle.