Dear Cameron,
I think I’ll always say it on your birthday, or at the very least always think it, but I can’t even believe another year has gone by and that you are now a three year old. It seems like just yesterday you were still a chubby little toddler in your diaper excited about excavators and your dirt cake. You still had rolls on your thighs and a mullet of curls. I miss them.
Now, you are a boy. You drive a tractor like it’s nobody’s business. Seriously, it is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life and the one single part of your second year that I will absolutely never forget. You stand up when you are going downhill like my outdoorsy boyfriends did while driving their four wheelers in high school and that isn’t a learned behavior because you’ve never seen another person do it. It is just intrinsic to your nature. You shift that sucker into second gear and you get this look on your face like you are thrilled by the speed of it and you tear down the driveway, laying off the gas at the precise moment you need to in order to skid the tires out and spin 180 degrees JUST in time to not run into one of the cars. Your sister runs and hides when she hears your tractor because she is completely terrified by the way you drive it and to be honest, I think it horrifies your father as well. But, I cannot explain to you how much I love to watch you.
You love trains and big trucks and anything that has a trailer and a boat. Basically you love anything with wheels. You still love keys. Your fascination with keys is something that I will never ever understand. You will stand next to me and demand that I move the keys from one key ring to another over and over again. You put our keys in the weirdest places and it drives us both absolutely insane. But I love it anyways because it is just so YOU.
You cut dad and me a break and were potty trained in like two days. I hesitate to even put that out there for fear that all of the people that have promised me that you’ll regress as soon as the new baby comes will be right, but I don’t think so. You hate to have wet pants and you are absolutely disgusted by the thought of pooping in your pants. I think you had about a dozen accidents total in the first two weeks you went without diapers which pretty much makes you a potty training super star. You never made me scrape poop out of underwear like your sister did and for that, my son, I cannot thank you enough. It’s like you realized how big of a challenge you’ve been about pretty much every other big transition in your life and you just decided that you weren’t going to make us suffer during the whole potty training thing. Now let’s just work a bit on your aim, OK?
You are going to make us pay the ultimate price for ever even once letting you sleep in our bed. I have already resigned myself to sleeping in your bed with the baby once he comes because I know there is absolutely no chance in hell that I’m going to get you out of our bed without the biggest throw down in history. You had a cold last week and dad got your vaporizer hooked up in your room and then hooked up a vaporizer in our room as well anticipating your inevitable arrival and you looked at the vaporizer in our room on your way to the bath and said, “That’s for when I come into your room, right?” After I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I made your dad swear that he didn’t tell you why he was doing it and the only logical conclusion we came to is that you made that deduction yourself. It blew me away. It also made me laugh hysterically.
You have a knack for that. You make everyone laugh hysterically. You are absolutely the life of the party and you have always commanded the attention of everyone in every room you’ve ever entered. Becky at daycare has told me repeatedly that while you might be one of the most challenging kids she’s ever had at daycare, you are also the funniest. She said she has more Cameron stories than any other. You love people. Like any person. You love it when they look at you and you love to make them laugh. You turn into the craziest little thing on the planet when we have company running around like a maniac and talking a million miles a minute. Renee and dad and I are all pretty quiet people but you make up for it and this house is far from quiet with you living in it. When you are in a room, you won’t ever be missed. I hope you never lose that.
You are a daddy’s boy to the core and while there are glimpses here and there of you turning into a mommy’s boy, all it takes is for you to get a cold or for me to have a bad day and you go right back to clinging to him. When you are sick you want absolutely nothing to do with me and if your dad has the audacity to not be sitting next to you every single second of the day, you whine. You are the world’s best whiner. You have turned whining into an art form. Not a day goes by that I don’t tell you that "I don’t speak whine” and you know what? You just go right on whining anyways. You are three in every sense of the word three and throw a mean temper tantrum. You throw a mean temper tantrum every seventeen seconds it seems somedays.
But, at the core, you are a lover. You are compassionate and caring. You are a thoughtful little boy that watches out for the kids that are smaller than you at daycare. You cry every time Nena and Grandpa or Rama and Papa leave because you just want them to stay here with you. I fell down the stairs a few weeks ago and your concern and how you touched me on the shoulder and earnestly promised, "It will be OK, mom, I promise" as the tears flowed down my face and how you cried too just at the thought of me crying is something I won't forget. I love you, son, and even if somedays you pretend you don't, I know you love me too.
Happy Third Birthday, buddy, my bug, my little Bubba Dude.
Mama