June is Three

We spent a long weekend in Chicago celebrating our granddaughter June’s birthday.  It was a doozy.  She can make the “b” sound but somehow has not connected it to the beginning of birthday.  When I walked into her house on Friday, she ran to me busting to talk.

“Papa, it’s my ‘irthday!  And I’m three!”

“You’re not a baby anymore June.”

“No. I’m big!”

June grows and changes every day.  Especially when it comes to vocabulary.  A popular phrase in her house, often spoken to her by her parents, is “use your words.”  She has command of more and more every day.  But there are times she forgets to use them.

The twos weren’t terrible for June as often billed.  But she does have difficulty when she doesn’t get her way.  She’s not screaming as often anymore, but she gets visibly angry. That’s when her parents say “use your words”, and then use their words back.  It’s beginning to work.  Every day she finds new words to express how she feels.  Not that speech and cognition are magic bullets. 

Consider this day earlier in the week.  My daughter Maureen, June’s mother, had to work early and Shannon, June’s nanny, arrived while June was still having breakfast.  Maureen left right away. 

When breakfast was over, June pointed to a cabinet and said “biden.”  Long i. 

“Biden?” Shannon repeated.  She had no idea what June was saying.  Couldn’t be the president.

“What is biden, June?”

“Biden,” June said louder, surprised that Shannon didn’t understand, and annoyed.

The day fell apart from there.  June wouldn’t let it go, and Shannon couldn’t figure out how to break the code.  She looked in the cabinet, tried to distract June, and did often, but throughout the day June would remember, go to the kitchen, demand “biden”, and melt down when she didn’t get what she wanted.  Shannon marks it as one of their worst days.

June’s dad Don goes to work early and gets home first.  As soon as he walked in the back door, June ran towards him, with Shannon close behind. 

“Daddy!  Biden!”

Don opened the cupboard, pulled out a bottle of children’s vitamin gummies from the back, and gave her one.  June looked at Shannon and gloated.

“Biden is June’s word for vitamin.  We give her one in the morning when she finishes breakfast.  She thinks it’s a treat.”

”You guys,” Shannon said,  “you have to tell me these things.  She’s been frustrated and mad at me all day.”

Everybody is doing the best they can.  Learning a language is not a smooth road.

The weekend was packed.  Saturday morning, we made pancakes.  June is always part of this.  She’s handy with the whisk, as long as the bowl is wide and deep.

“I do it,” she says, adding the ingredients her mom measures out; three tablespoons of baking powder to the flour, a bunch of chia seeds, and a measure of oat milk.  I mash a banana and slide it in the bowl, her mom adds sugar.  A little skimpy on the sugar, I think.  She’ll be skimpy with the syrup too when they’re served.  I always want to sweeten it up more for June.  Not my call.  When the ingredients are assembled, June does the whisking.  She’s done it before and considers it her job. 

These words “I do it” pop up often.  June likes to pick out her clothes, undress, and dress herself.  It’s faster for adults to dress her.  Sometimes June gets her underwear on backwards or gets one leg in a leg hole and the other in the waistband.  But I’ve learned to use my words, wait patiently, and let her do it.  Harder than it seems.  I have no idea how this all worked at our house thirty-seven years ago when June’s mom was her age.  Gone from the memory bank.  It’s parenting, or rather grandparenting, made new for me by the years.

After breakfast, we drove to Great Wolf Lodge in Gurnee, a giant water park with an attached hotel and more.  The parking lot is sprawling and full.  You can smell the chlorine as soon as you walk in the door. 

People are already waiting for the water park to open with all their gear: floaties, goggles, coolers, you name it.  When the park opens, those in line rush to get seats close to the action, where they set up camp, watch their kids, shout above the rush and noise of the water, and enjoy the day.  For us, it was find our room, get our swimming suits on, and get in the water as soon as possible.

Despite all that Great Wolf Lodge is: food stands, an arcade, a dance hall, a giant breakfast buffet, a ropes course, and more – in the end it’s all about the water.  Looming just past the lobby is a giant two-story-tall space with tubes and slides winding through it, towers of steps, a giant bucket that dumps every ten minutes or so, a wave pool, screams, crying, laughter, heat, humidity, and chaos.  The place was absolutely stuffed with kids and young parents.  Circling the whole kit and kaboodle was the lazy river, packed with inner tubes and people.  At least they were all going the same direction. 

We were there last year for June’s birthday, so she knew the drill.  This year she immediately disappeared.  Her parents assumed she would go to the little kid’s slides she enjoyed last year, but no.  June had other ideas.  June’s other grandma, Nona, who had trailed behind, caught up to us and pointed.

“I saw her go straight up those stairs.”

It was the tower leading to the big slides.  The rest of our group, June’s aunt and uncle and two cousins, friends of Don and Moe and their two boys, and Grandma Colleen, were carrying towels and gear to put down on chairs and mark our area.  I was empty-handed.

“I’ll find her” I said confidently and waded through the shallow water to the tower steps.

I arrived just in time for the giant bucket near the roof to reach its tipping point and send water crashing down on everyone below.  It felt like it all landed on me.  I put my hand over my glasses to keep them on my face.  Welcome to Great Wolf Lodge.

June was near the top sitting on the steps near the line waiting to go down the giant orange slide, not the biggest in the park, but close.  A nice young staffer, who looked to be about fourteen, politely told me she was too small to use it.  Not that I would have let her.

“Let’s go back down June.”

“OK, Papa.”

June ended up spending her day mostly on the pink and purple slides.  In height and speed, they were two notches above the yellow slides and never failed to make June smile when she came shooting out the pipe at the bottom.  If she went down those slides once, she went down a hundred times.  It was perpetual motion.  Shoot out the bottom, climb over the side, run through shallow water to get back to the steps, climb to the steps to the entrance, and do it again.  Over and over and over.  It wore me out just watching her.

We persuaded June and her four friends, all boys about her age, to stop for snacks and drinks.  But they wouldn’t stop long.  We got them to try the wave pool, which was hard to manage on their own without adults, so that was short-lived.  Even at three and four, they preferred the freedom of being on their own.  It happens so fast, doesn’t it?

We were successful in getting June to join me on some trips around the park on the lazy river.  She wanted her own inner tube of course, but latched onto my thumb and didn’t let go.  We traveled together, spinning around, navigating between the other floaters.  We pretended we were boat captains, navigating the current.  I hope I can get June on a real boat in Ottawa this summer.  Maybe a canoe trip down the Fox.  June’s to-do list is wide open.  I want to be part of it as much as I can.

When we left the water park and headed back to our rooms, we went into Birthday party mode.  The largest of our four rooms became the party room, we had the pizza delivered, got out the cupcakes Don and Moe made the day before, assembled presents, and when everyone arrived the party was on.  

What makes kids in hotels jump on the beds?  It’s universal.  It got loud, we had some drinks, and when we had eaten our fill of pizza, we gathered around June to light the candles, turn out the lights, and started singing her the Happy Birthday song. 

Those moments are June’s favorites.  Some kids are shy or embarrassed to be the center of so much attention.  June is not.  She glanced quickly at everyone singing and turned her attention to the three candles on the cupcake in front of her, doing everything she could not to blow them out before the singing stopped.  It was a repeat of the year before, with a taller June standing again in the midst of family and friends drinking in their love.

 When we got to the last “happy birthday to you…” June blew the candles out with a blast of air and led the yelling and clapping.  Another year in the books.  Will we all be here next year?  I hope so.

The next day after breakfast in the lodge at 7:00, June and her friends were hard at play in the water park until check out, when we went our separate ways.  We went back to June’s house to stay one more night.  She was asleep in her now front-facing car seat before we left the parking lot.

I forgot how deeply overtired kids can sleep.  When we were back at Don and Moe’s Hermosa bungalow June was dead to the world.  Lost in that kind of sleep where your arms dangle, your head rolls back, you don’t wake up for anything.  June’s Dad carried her to bed. 

Sometime later Don and Moe agreed that if they didn’t wake June up soon, she wouldn’t sleep through the night.  Those are discussions young parents have all the time.  Don opened her bedroom door, turned off the white noise machine, and opened the curtains.  Nothing.  We thought she would wake and come out to greet us.  June kept sleeping.

After a while I asked, “Can I go in there and maybe coax her awake?”

Moe answered.  “Go for it, Papa.”

I parked myself in a rocking chair by June’s bed and watched her sleep.  Then I started whistling as softly as I could “Dream a Little Dream of Me”.  I thought it was written by the Mamas and the Papas. That’s the sound I have in my head, Mama Cass’s sweet voice hitting those nice clear notes perfectly.  Turns out  the music was written by Fabian Andre and Gus Schwandt and the lyrics by Gus Kahn, in 1931.  It was later made popular by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day.

The whistling didn’t wake her up, so I sang the lyrics.  Most of them came back to me.  Even the second verse:

              Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you,

              Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you,

              But in your dreams whatever they be,

              Dream a little dream of me.

June rolled over, opened her eyes, and listened, but said nothing.  After a while she sat up, put the soles of her feet together, and held them with her hands.  In yoga that pose is “happy baby.”  June yawned repeatedly.  Then told me this, out of the blue.

“It’s OK a cry.  Like you get a shot?  You cry causa hurts. Know what Papa?”

June’s voice went up on the words know what Papa.  Just three years old and already uptalking.  She waited for me to respond.

“What June?”

“Doan hafta keep crying causa gone.  Hurt goes sway.  Doan hafta cry. ‘S gone.”

She held her hands out palms up beside her.  All gone.

Wisdom from a three-year-old, likely taught to her by her parents.  I can’t wait to hear what she’s thinking when she’s four.

Happy birthday June.