At-man will be four in January. Every year I promise I will get it together and plan out his birthday party months in advance, and every year it still sneaks up on me. This year is especially difficult because not only am I knee deep in yuletide festivities, but At-man has demanded to have a say in his party for the first time and he wants Spiderman all the way. I have always favored more open-ended themes, 1 was bubbles, 2 we had stars, and for 3 we had a fire truck cake and a trip to the fire station with all his friends. Since swinging from building to building on a spider web shot from your own wrist is completely out of the question for a 4 year old, I’m sort of stumped. Not that Spiderman isn’t cool, I’m sure he’s a great guy. He just doesn’t exactly bring out the Martha in me.

I can’t believe how much you can miss about someone who is not quite four years old. I have said all along and still believe that every year older he becomes is my new favorite age. He has gone from being a baby to being more like a friend. A friend that cares entirely nothing about anything I say, but hey, don’t we all have a few friends like that?

I think the thing I am going to miss most as he grows is the little At-isims he uses to replace any word he can’t pronounce. All kids have these and no two are the same. At-man started with Ya-yo, his term for yellow. I always thought it was so cute, and then one day it was gone, replaced by plain old yellow. I still miss it. One we only recently lost was yo-grit. It was his favorite food for a while so it came up often. Now that the holidays are upon us, we have been watching the Snoofie Christmas Special. I think the P sound must take a while to get down. At the ripe age of three and 11/12ths he has all ready decided that when he gets out of college he is going to be either an aster-not, or a science-tist. He’s not sure. Even now, as I sit here writing this I have been informed that Em is playing with leck-tris-ty (yes I stepped away from the computer for that one). I think the reason I miss and will miss these sayings so much is that they are so few and far between. This kid could correctly say Constantinople, and sarcophagus at 2 years old.

You know how whenever you get together with a bunch of elderly family members they all have these little incomplete snippets of you childhood to share? I just can’t bare the idea of losing the memory of ya-yo. Hopefully now that I’ve gotten this out of my system I can focus on Spidey a bit better.