Old Peanuts

The Peanut has always been up against it. When My wife was pregnant, a blood test came back that said the Peanut (At that time, the size of an actual peanut) had a 1-in-3 chance of being born with a birth defect so severe it would render her non-viable.

We had to wait a month and a half--until my wife and the Peanut were ready for an amnio--until we found out for sure. That was a wicked fun 45 days.

After she was born, she wouldn't eat. Would not latch. Not good on the bottle. We had a lactation consultant in the hospital who helped to really fuck the situation up good. We fed her with a pump and a tube and a syringe and our fingers for a month before a friend who happened to be an ex-nicu nurse was able to help.

She's got a kidney condition known as urinary reflux. Which for a time meant way too many catheters.

That's probably an understatement as "too many catheters" can be mathematically expressed as 1.

As she's grown, barely, we've had to go to dietitians, keep a wary eye on the scale, and beseech her to "eat Peanut, eat. You gotta eat if you want to be strooong."

Now, she eats ok. Not great, but at least enough to sustain life and growth. She's the smallest girl in her class, but not the weakest.

Despite, or more likely because of ( the Peanut is a contrarian delight. If her classmates are excited by some new Barbies in the play area, the Peanut can probably be found wandering around the pretend kitchen making pretend calls and cooking and eating pretend cookies. She won't eat real food, but she puts away enough pretend food to be pretend morbidly obese. Frustrating.) my efforts at disparaging little girl Princess stereotypes, she is all pinks and ruffles and sparkles and fairy wings. Which suits her. She's so small and fine. So light on her feet. We were so worried about her for the first few years. She seems other-wordly. Like a changeling, my wife says. A changeling who could just slip through our fingers and disappear.

She's also all poop jokes, and fart noises. Puke sound effects and fake burps. A fluttering, sparkling, twisting, spinning, leaping, farting, puking, burping, laughing, pink will-o-the wisp.  If you've never seen an elf-fairy-changeling princess crack itself up by making a fart noise and then retching because it's so "smelly and disgusting," you should.

She's can be bossy as hell with her little brother. Which would really suck if she wasn't the same way at times with her mother and me. Bossy's not great, but it's way better than being a bully.

She's careful and smart. She's monkey -agile. She's sly. She's got bad moods like sudden downpours in the spring.

She is also Four years old. I can't believe it. Happy Birthday, little girl. We love you very, very much.

Mommy
Daddy
Pumpkin Man.





P.S. Meant to get this up on the twelfth because that's her bday, but I didn't quite make it. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew the correct date. So you can back date those gift checks.