Christmas with a 2-year-old

On my computer desktop there is a little boy in white T-shirt and blue pants, shown in profile, hunkered down in that nonchalant squat that young kids and athletes make look easy. Arthritic adults wince at the mere thought of all their weight swung between two knees.

The boy is about two. A breeze riffles his spun-gold hair, and his cheek is rosy pink. He is caught in profound deliberation of the treasure before him – the wheel of one of his sisters’ bikes; the index fingers of both hands are poking cautioiusly into the gears. The bike, fortunately, is chained to a sturdy swing set and not going anywhere.

The entire background is bright green grass studded with a few dandelions, and all so clear you’d swear it’s three-dimensional.

The beautiful child is our dearly beloved Samuel. This is the object of our earthly adoration. Nothing in our experience has stirred our emotions so deeply.

I remember when our firstborn was placed in my arms, and I did not feel the wave of love the sages had promised. It took a few days – bonding, they call it today – but when it happened, it had all the subtlety of a loaded dump truck.

And when the second and third were born over the course of five years or so, we always asked the same question: How can we possibly love another, so concentrated is our love for one?

And yet we did. Love’s funny that way. Samuel’s mom has said the same thing. Already she loves the huge lump growing below her breasts; she talks to it, calls it by name: Uriah. She plays music for Uriah as she did for Samuel.

Samuel sings in a pure, sweet voice, learning another song nearly every day. His grandma (that would be me) taught him “Row, row, row your boat.” Our favorite of his is, “Winkle, winkle, widdle stah, How why wondah what you ah.”

He also knows the alphabet lesson to the same tune, and “Winkle, winkle, widdle BAT! How why wondah where you AT,” and his grandma cringes at the syntax.

His default favorite, his mother says, is the chorale from the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Don’t be put off because it sounds so highbrow. You’d recognize it as a hymn, “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee!”

This precious little boy, for two-and-a-half years the center of his family’s universe, the vastly over-photographed and over-written subject of the world, is about to be asked to move over and cede his role of Alpha male. And his mother wisely appointed me the one who will see that the transition is carried out gently.

Samuel speaks only in single words or in very short phrases, because he discovered he can grab your finger and gently but firmly put it where he wants you to notice something.

He loves cars and wheels. In one of my favorite photos of him here at our house, Grandpa Dave has pushed his chair back from the table and is holding the paper straight up and down, reading the sports section. On the other side, a little blond boy is scrutinizing the car ads on the back.

At his house, he has become the circulation department. MommEEEE! gets the front sections, big brother Isaac gets the comics, and Samuel gets the car pages, studying so intently, you half expect they’ll burst into flame. “Wheeeels!” he sometimes chortles.

He found out courtesy helps. The last time we were there, early in October, he was reaching up his arms to be picked up, and saying in this tiny voice, “Up, peez.” The sound of “up” without the “p” works for “down” or “out.” Sort of an all-purpose vowel, saying, “Time to get a move on.”

My favorite of his phrases is, “Sowwy, kid.” When he is into something he’s not supposed to be in, like the tangles of computer wires that festoon his daddy’s desk, Isaac will take his hand and lead him away, saying, “Sorry, kid. You’re not supposed to touch Daddy’s computer stuff.”

“Sowwy, kid,” Samuel echos sweetly.

I know this is the last week to wish you all a Merry Christmas or whatever your winter celebration may be called, and this has not exactly been a Christmas column. But while musing over my daughter with her firstborn, and my own delight upon being a grandma, I wonder….

Did the young mother of Jesus, raising her baby son in the relative safety of Nazareth, get to experience the sheer fun of life with a 2-year-old? The satisfaction of teaching him to sing, to throw a ball, to speak in sentences? I hope so.

It seems to me she deserved some joy to allay the anxiety surrounding her boy’s earliest days.

She deserved Christmas.