Abby Is Five!

This week our middle daughter, Abby, turned five.

Even though she is our middle child, since her older brother is adopted, she had the honor of being my first pregnancy. 

She was, by far, our most difficult baby. She could stay awake for 20 hours at a time and would only stop crying if you were holding her vertically, standing up, and swaying back and forth a certain way. We got through her entire first year without more than two hours of sleep at a time. She could (and still can) hit octaves only matched by Mariah Carey. When I delivered her, they had to keep her separated from all of the other babies in the hospital nursery because her ear-piercing screams woke up all of the other babies at the same time and caused quite a commotion. That’s Abby, rallying the troops for her cause since Day 1.

There was no denying that she was beautiful, though. Actually, it drives me kind of nuts because often the first and only thing people comment on when speaking to her is the way that she looks. There is so much more to her than that. But even as a baby, strangers would come up to us and say that she should be a model. Once I even had an artist I had never met before approach me and ask me for a picture of her to use as a basis for an oil painting.

Now Abby is our smart, sassy, and independent one. She is often the child that pushes my buttons the most because she is a lot like me, except much stronger and more self-aware than I was at her age. When she grows up, I have no doubt that she will be a force to be reckoned with.

She has a good heart. Last weekend we were at an Easter egg hunt where a little girl was crying because she didn’t have a basket for her eggs and Abby, without being prompted, took her by the hand and said, “Come with me, I’ll help you.”

Abby is my negotiator. She won’t do anything simply because she is told. She needs a reason, and if she doesn’t believe the reason you have supplied is good enough she will try to negotiate or present her own argument to the contrary. And she is usually at least partially right.

My challenge as her mom is to try to decipher when it is okay to admit she has a better idea when I need to stand my ground.

“Abby, put on your tennis shoes.”

“But I want to wear my dress-up shoes.”

“You’re playing outside, go put your tennis shoes on.”

“But mommy, these are my old dress-up shoes and I don’t need them for church or Easter anymore so it won’t matter if they get dirty. And I don’t need socks with them, so there is less laundry to do. Please, mommy?”

“Ok, fine. Just get some shoes on.”

Everything is always a negotiation with her. From what she can have for breakfast to what she will wear to school that day. Some things, like staying with a grown-up in a busy parking lot, are not up for negotiation, but I secretly like that she is willing to challenge authority with well thought out arguments. And I don’t actually care if she goes to preschool with pink and grey striped pants, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a zebra print sweater. (Which she totally did on Wednesday.)

I do not love the whining that seems to come with the territory of being an almost kindergartener. I’m hoping that will fade away in time. 

But I do love every minute of being Abby’s mom.

Speaking of time, Abby is on her own clock. It is a challenge for us not to rush her. She likes to make sure that one task is completely finished before moving on to the next. Bath time is not over until every bubble is gone. A book is not finished until she has looked at every picture twice and made sure that she doesn’t have any further questions. 

And she asks hard questions. Questions like, “If someone is a really nice person and they do lots of nice things, but they don’t believe in God, do they have to go to ‘hells’ when they die?” 

She loves dressing up, hide and seek, the movie Frozen, singing and dancing, pretending she knows how to read, rhyming words, and having tea parties with her dolls and stuffed animals. 

She has beautiful blond curls, blue eyes, her mother’s pale complexion, and ears she still hasn’t quite grown into. 

Welcome to five, Abigail.

Your adventures are just beginning.