Silas is 4!

Silas turned four on Friday, and on Saturday we hosted about ten friends and their families to celebrate the birthday.



We've posted pictures of Esther, Liam and Roni, and Silas and Gabby. Many more pictures are here.




Four seems so old to us. Silas looks like a big kid all of a sudden! Here's an attempt to describe his four-year-old self.

As our downstairs neighbors can attest, Silas is as rambunctious as any kid we know. The chief victim of his exuberance is Rosemary. He is consistently too rough with her: bouncing her swing too hard, shoving toys into her face, and crawling into her playmat and literally climbing on top of her. When we get mad at him, his first line of defense is always, "But she's laughing!" -- which is true.

Silas adores his sister. When people come to our apartment, Silas will say to them, "Have you seen my baby?" He is prone to walking by her, pausing to give her a kiss, and then moving on. Out of the blue he might say, "I love Rosemary," or "I just love her." He wants her constant attention. ("Rosemary, look at me! Rose MARY! Look at ME!") Of course, there is a healthy sibling rivalry, at least on Silas's end. If Meredith and I are both occupied with Rosemary, Silas will cry out from the next room: "I'm lonely!"

We are proudest of Silas's kindness to other children. At yesterday's party, when he noticed a newcomer looking shy, Silas would run up, give a big hello, and then say something like, "We're all playing with trains in my room -- come on and play with us." At the sandbox, if he sees a kid looking sad without a toy, Silas will frequently walk over and give up one of his own toys without being asked. (Other parents are thunderstruck when this happens.)

We love talking with Silas, especially these days as he is trying to figure things out. He recently said to me, "Aliens always have one eye or three eyes. But not two eyes. Right, Dad?" He's also a bit of a moralizer. When someone won't share, refuses to say hi, or throws sand, Silas will say -- not directly to the kid, but sotto voce to one of us -- "Mom, that was rude."

Silas's main creative endeavor is building things. He is not much for drawing pictures, throwing balls, playing board games -- he tends to avoid rules and expectations. He would much rather take six random objects and see if they can fit into each other or be stacked. Silas finds unexpected uses for everything: for instance, if you remove all of Mr. Potato Head's pieces, you can attach the body to the bathtub faucet and make a great fountain, with water shooting out of all the appendage holes. Silas loves funnels, pennies, dental floss (he'll unspool the entire roll and string dozens of items together).

Back in June on the last day of preschool, the teachers returned to the parents all the toys from home that had been forgotten in the schoolroom. When Miss Vicky got to us she said, "I've been teaching a long time. This is a first." She handed us an empty dental floss container.