Jayna: 3 years

Dear Jayna,

Ah, my little princess. My sweet, adorable, loving, incorrigible, stubborn, ear-splittingly loud little princess. Three years old—going on 16. Just as your brother’s transformation over the past year has been dramatic, so, too, has yours.

Your development from your second birthday until now might best be expressed via a line graph:

Oh, and speaking of your ever-growing tendency to be difficult: Do you mind if I write this letter myself? Because, you know, lately, you want to do everything on your own, regardless of how implausible that scenario might be.

For months, your rallying cries have been “I can do it!” and “I want to do it!”; pour the juice, mix the macaroni and cheese, squeeze the toothpaste from the tube, open the yogurt, zip up your own incredibly difficult-to-zip zipper—you name it, and it’s something you want to do unassisted. Very admirable … but also frequently irritating, especially as these displays of autonomy have a tendency to end in spilled liquids, powdered-cheese explosions, longer-than-necessary teeth-brushing sessions, modern-art yogurt exhibits, and frustratingly delayed departures.

Your drive to be independent is both commendable and impressive. When paired with your all-time favorite word, however, that drive can be maddening. What word is that, you ask? Let me give you a hint: It starts with an “n” and ends with an “o” and it comes out of your mouth roughly a gazillion times per day, particularly when preceded by a request or direction from your mother and/or I.

You are the queen of “No.” If “No”s were holstered weapons, you would be the fastest “No” in the East. You have become so proficient at wielding your “No”s that you often fire them off before Mommy and/or I have finished the sentence to which you are objecting.

“Jayna, please don’t—”

“No!”

“—stand on—”

“NO!”

“—that carton of—”

“NOOOOOO!”

“—pressure-sensitive—”

“NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

“—explosives.”

OK, perhaps the actual circumstances surrounding your refusals aren’t quite so dire, but if they were … well, you wouldn’t stand a chance.

Luckily for you—and us—the degree to which you are difficult is actually far outweighed by the degree to which you are downright adorable, funny and lovable.

First of all, you are still rather petite—in the 50th percentile for your age, which is quite an eye-opener for a father who thought that 3-year-olds were supposed be as big as your off-the-charts brother was at age 3. I’m pretty sure Zan could have kicked my ass when he was 3.

Between your small stature, your wispy, strawberry-blonde hair, your propensity for making funny faces and sounds, and your total disregard for your own physical safety, it’s like having ’round-the-clock entertainment from our own personal Muppet.

This is currently your favorite funny face to make (which is hysterical to see in person, but looks kinda scary when frozen in a still image; I might have to swap this out for video at some point):

You are addicted to swinging. I did not know such an addiction was possible, but you have set me straight on that count. To you, a day without swinging is a day not worth living. If I had a quarter for each time per day that you ask, “Will you push me on the swing?,” I would be able to hire you your very own swing-pushing servant.

“Higher, Daddy! Push me higher!”

“How high do you want me to push you, sweetie?”

“Up to Luna!” [You prefer to call the moon Luna.]

A wonderful development of recent weeks is your newfound ability to pump your legs properly while on the swing, thereby negating the need for us to be at your “Push me!” beck and call (though you do still like us to push you some of the time, and I hope you always will). Another equally valuable by-product of your self-propulsion on the swing is that, after seeing you master the feat, Zan finally grasped the concept, and is now able to do the same.

Your fearless physicality and mastery of your little body is the perfect counterbalance for Zan, whose self-preservation instincts run oh-so-much deeper than yours. Seeing his little sister attempt feats he normally would shy away from has definitely helped him stretch beyond his own comfort zone … though I wouldn’t look for him on the U.S. Olympic gymnastic team just yet.

As for you, however … well, we should probably be programming Béla Károlyi’s phone number into our speed-dial.

If Zan’s thing is baseball, then yours is definitely gymnastics. We enrolled you in a weekly gymnastics class for toddlers, and to say that you took to it like a fish to water would be giving too much credit to the fish.

Going hand-in-hand with your affinity for gymnastics is your love of music and dancing. You, my child, like to bust a move … and when you do, it’s serious business.

You eat like a bird … and by “bird,” I mean “hummingbird.” I think there may have been one time over the past year when you completely finished a meal, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it by any means. Of course, a big reason for this is that you are not the least bit interested in sitting still at the table long enough to consume all of your food. We have adapted to this by excusing you from the table (because the alternative is to try to dine while you burst our eardrums with your screams of protest) and then calling you back every couple of minutes so that we can feed you another bite of your meal. I’m sure there are parents who will scowl at this approach and insist that we should force you to remain at the table during meal time, but because our strategy results in your consumption of about three times as much food as you would otherwise eat on your own, and offers the side benefit of allowing us to finish our own meals in relative peace, I would kindly suggest that those parents can bite me.

No birthday celebration around Casa de Scratches is complete without a theme, and for your third, you chose Tinkerbell. Cuteness ensued:

And so now you’re three, and you’ll be starting preschool in September, and I don’t know how this all happened so quickly. Another reason why I am fond of your smallish size: it helps me feel that you’re not growing up too too fast; when I lift your little body up and you wrap yourself around me and lay your head on my shoulder, I am comforted by how much you are still my cute little baby girl (though the pacifier—or “pah-piece,” as you call it—has to go; your future orthodontist is going to be a wealthy man because of the permanent space your teeth have created for that blue piece of rubber).

Thanks for making me feel like such a lucky Daddy, princess.

I love you.

Love,

Daddy