Happy Birthday Elliot

 Dear Elliot,

3 years ago your mommy went into labor a few weeks before your due date. You are fortunate to be part of a loving clan. There were already so many people waiting to meet you.

Now that we had a good sense of your birthdate, your great Aunt Marjie went to work doing your astrological chart. Smart, generous, incredibly stubborn - check, check, check. She also let us know that you would have a distinctive birthmark on your back….check. Aunt Marjie is spooky.

Because of COVID, we weren’t allowed to go to the hospital. I remember waiting in the garage. We couldn’t even wait until you were inside.

Sandy and I both grabbed and held you at the same time.

Just so you know, grandparents have hearts that can be full of unlimited amounts of love, but you are the only one who turned me into a grandma.

You were SUCH a fussy little fellow. I tucked you into an infant front carrier and we danced together for months. Dancing and nursing were just about the only ways you calmed down. I could only help with one of those.

Lauren made a playlist for you. Build me up buttercup, Harry Belafonte, Broadway…It was an eclectic mix, setting you up from the beginning to have an appreciation for many musical genres.

I loved how you snuggled right in! You still snuggle and I don’t take that for granted.

Suddenly, at around the four month mark, you finally stopped crying. 

Your big dog Bowie decided that keeping you safe was his reason for being, and he is always nearby. It never occurs to you to be scared of him,

Papa and Grandma buy you a little Fisher Price ride-on school bus. You can pull yourself up on it, but your feet don’t quite touch the ground. The bus lives at our house and you spend hours playing on it when you are over..

Blink and you are more than  a year old. You  communicate with signs, and then your  language skills start to snowball and astonish us all. While you have so much to say, and your immediate family can understand you fairly well, your goal is for the echo device to follow your command.

“Alexa! Play the wheels on the bus”

I’m sorry…I don’t know how to help you with that

(Be patient, she will understand you soon)

Part of your early vocabulary included notable words such as golf cart (your favorite) and bulldozer.

 You eat most anything; Burmese, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Ethiopian. We all delight in your adventurous eating.

We feel your muscles as you eat all that ‘growing food’.

You are not quite two and you are a sponge, soaking up all sorts of information.

One day you and I are laying on the lawn playing the senses game. What do we see, smell, hear? You point out an airplane. It has the typical trail of white condensation leaving a line in the sky. I teach you that this is called a contrail.

Several weeks later you are out with family friends. You look up in the sky and accurately point out that you see an airplane and it’s contrail. The adults that you are with are essentially blown away. (Speaking of airplanes, you have been on 41 airplane rides!)

When you are tired, it doesn’t matter where you are. You take a rest on whatever is available. Your mom has a funny collection of the random places where you stop to lie down

Now you are two. You can easily climb up on the toy bus and your feet have no trouble hitting the floor. You like to zoom around grandma and papa’s house…Bowie is often either following right behind you or trying to avoid being run over.

One of the other toys at my house is a puzzle that has lots of colors and shapes. You have so much fun saying ‘yellow parallelogram.’ You tell your mom that you really like her purple rhombus earrings.

You are obsessed with music. You play on the piano and harmonica and can make a sound out of a saxophone and a flute. More often than not you are holding a guitar or ukulele. You know the lyrics to many songs, you know how a capo works, and your pitch is remarkable.

You like to help. One of your favorite things is to clean the carpet with Papa. You spritz the resolve and then scrub with the brush before moving on to another area that you notice need a little attention.

You throw up your hands and say “Oy vey..there is another spot”:

When you are 2/12 you move to LA. Luckily it isn’t so far and we make sure that we see you as often as we can.

You are in a supermarket shopping cart with Bobby, your other grandmother. You are singing the song “In my room” by the beach boys at the top of your lungs.

Another shopper stops to listen. The Beach boys? He is only 2? This made my day!

You like to give concerts. You arrange your assorted stuffed animal, dolls and puppets into a nice little audience.

You speak into your microphone:

“Good evening everyone, you are all sitting so nicely” and then you proceed with some singing.

During this holiday season You OOH and AAAH over the sparkly lights. Says the almost 3 year old, “These are the prettiest lights I have seen in my WHOLE life!”

Here is a snapshot of a week that you spent here in December. Just shy of your third birthday…

You were naked more often than not; you have mastered potty training, including nights, so not wearing pants around the house isn’t an issue.

The only thing you were wearing most of the time was a guitar strapped around your neck.

Several times a day, you would go into the kitchen and say, “I am still hungry. Let me see what my options are”, as you opened the refrigerator and helped yourself to whatever you found. Cheese, yogurt, fruit and berries were popular finds.

One of your favorite things to eat is something that you refer to as ‘grandma noodles’ (Israeli couscous with little peas and carrots in it)

You still love to clean the carpet.

Another choice activity was  to go out and ‘drive’ papa’s car. You played pretend about all of the places we were going.

Papa allowed you to actually turn on the ignition and then it is time to clean the windshields and get the wipers going

During this week I noticed that you were getting big for the bus, but you still played with it. Now instead of riding it, you got out your tools turned it upside down and spent time “fixing it”

You were obsessed with Aunt Alana’s rainbow bath bombs and tried to convince us all to let you use more than one per bath.

I was sitting in the bathroom with you and you were getting annoyed that I wasn’t letting you have a third.

“Grandma, you can go…tell Baba to come in here instead”

You learned how to make the security pattern on my tablet. It took time and patience. You learned that it doesn’t work with wet fingers. Once you were on, you had access to YOUTUBE. You also can work a complicated remote control more easily than I can.

Your favorite thing to watch was Beauty and the Beast. You were able to fast forward through the scary part with the wolves. 

You liked to help in the kitchen.. We made cookies together. You stood on a little step stool rolling the dough and putting it on the baking sheet. You were naked of course.

Alexa now understands you. 

‘Alexa play the chipmunks”

Playing chipmunk radio from Judith’s pandora

The day after you left I got an email from Amazon confirming a purchase for ‘Green Gobbler Hair D…..’

I had to sign into Amazon so see the full order.  For a moment, between Alexa and access to my tablet, I was wondering if you had managed to somehow order something….hair dye?

It turned out you were innocent. It was a drain cleaner that Sandy had ordered, but I have no doubt that this could be a potential issue in the future.

While you were here, the house felt a bit like a sticky hurricane but we prefer that to the clean and quiet when you are not here.

You are not always easy. As Aunt Marjie predicted you are very very very stubborn. You like to do everything yourself. You occasionally like to push boundaries to see what exactly you can get away with.

I am grateful that I can watch excellent parenting in action as your mama and baba manage the moments when your behavior  reminds everyone that you are in fact just turning 3.

Most grandparents think that their grandchildren are the world's most magical creatures. But you, my sweet boy, are something special indeed. Your giggle is like no other. Your snuggles are the best. Your mind astonishes me. Your budding musicianship has my father, your great grandfather, dancing up in heaven.

I couldn’t love you any more! I can’t wait to see what you do next.

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