Dear Three Year-Old

Happy birthday! Around this time in 2009, my body was forcibly evicting your from the only home you had ever known, and you weren’t happy about it. (I don’t blame you, though. You had it good in there, what with cush digs and all that spicy Mexican food I had been nourishing you with for the last nine months.)

Although I don’t remember a whole lot about that day (thank you, narcotics), your dad swears up and down that I broke a couple of his fingers while you were making your grand entrance into the world. I think he’s just confusing that with the injuries I threatened to inflict should he look, ahem, down there. At 9:18 PM after 32 hours of labor, 2 hours of pushing, and one sadistic doctor who decided epidurals are for pussies, there you were, all squishy and red and royally pissed off.

This was you then:

Goddamn, you were cute. The first words out of my mouth when they cleaned you up and put you in my arms was that you looked just like your dad.

This is you now:

You still look just like your dad. Seriously kid, if I hadn’t been there when you ripped my loins asunder, I’d swear I had no part in making you. As far as I can tell, my only genetic contribution was the fact that we have the same weird fingertips that point up at the end. (When you are in college, your friends will show them to random women in bars just to see what they say. I am so very sorry. )

I can’t believe three years have gone by so quickly. There are some parts I’d rather not remember (and can’t manage to repress), but the other 99.8% of your life has been pretty effing magical. I’m pretty sure that in another ten years or so, I’ll tell everyone that you pooped rainbows and solved complex differential equations before you were even potty trained. You’re that awesome.

So let’s work on this whole waking up at the ass crack of dawn thing (and that whole picky eater thing) (and that while we’re at it, that whole screaming for no apparent reason other than to give me a heart attack thing) and the next three years will be just as amazing. I promise I’ll try my best not to embarrass you. Too much.