The Laura Blog

Dear Maren,

Today you’re 5. You’ve been crossing off days on a self-made countdown calendar for a month now, giving me what should have been a gracious amount of time to prepare. On one hand, I always feel like the time is slipping through my fingers, always just out of my grasp. On the other hand, you’re so ready to be 5. Brilliant, vibrant, and full of life. We who get to watch our babies grow up—we’re the lucky ones.

Your happiest days are spent outside, imaginatively playing with neighborhood friends and stopping just long enough to grab a snack before heading outside again. Our backyard retaining wall has been transformed into a mud kitchen where you mix and bake dirt, grass, and sticks together for hours. You learned to ride a two-wheeler this year, dead set on breaking just about record in our family after learning how to swim just a few months before. You’re never not moving unless you’re coloring or beating someone at a board game. God bless Crayola.

Still early to rise, you’re up with Oskar on most mornings before the world wakes up, peddling art projects and flying through reems of paper. I wake up most mornings to rainbow and heart cards with "I love you mama" scribbled inside. I started a pile of them which got so overwhelmingly large that I recently had to pare it down. My favorite card lately is one written out to "My 2 hearts", meaning to me and your dad. Not sure I’ll ever get over that one.

You spend most weekdays in a kindergarten class even though you’re 4, both because you were ready and because we certainly weren’t signing up for another year of a forced nap time at school. Through this classroom you've learned site words, addition, subtraction, and the beginning stages of reading which you enthusiastically demonstrate through a few books you’ll read to us at bedtime. You'll go roaring into your first year of official kindergarten this fall.

Your favorite foods list has been cut quite short as compared to my chubby cheeked toddler who would eat just about anything. Now when we play "best part / worst part" at dinner time and you have to tell us your least favorite part about your day, it’s always the food in front of you.

You love unicorns, hearts, smiley faces and rainbows, and want your hair in a loose pony every morning. Your hair is incredibly long, and it’s been a staunch refusal to cut it for 2 solid years—we’re currently in negotiations.  You love puzzles, board games, and reading, and remind me a lot of Oskar in that way. You have no stranger danger and will talk to anyone about anything and still remember people or conversations you had such a long time ago. You hold your own, and in a house with two big brothers, its them who are a little scared of you.

You’re girlie but you’re not, preferring soccer to babydolls but want to wear pink shorts while scoring goals. You still play with August who has the last remaining traces of childhood imagination in him. I always stop to watch you together because I know this time is fleeting.

We recently surprised you and your brothers with a puppy who is coming home at the end of March. You loved holding him and petting him, and when we asked you how you felt about getting another brother, you said, "As long as it’s not a human for God’s sake."

Some of my favorite time with you is at bedtime, snuggled up and reading together. We’ve finally graduated to falling asleep on your own, contentedly drifting off to the sound of stories on your Tonie Box despite your emphatic insistence that "sleep is boring".

Maren, you’re larger than life and we are obsessed with you. Your personality fills the room and the stories about you are endless, never not making us laugh.  May you always feel this confident, this powerful, this strong.

To my last baby, you’re one of my biggest dreams come true. I’ve loved you for five whole years—here’s to forever more.

Love, mama