Dear Leafy Boy,

It's been a while since I've written a letter to you, and I think by now you've grown at least a foot. Or maybe not a foot, maybe two. You are 18.433333 months old today, and it's odd to think that you are almost the age that your brother was when your sister was born, because he was SO BIG! And you, you are such a baby, still.

And you probably always will be. This is all perception, though, like when we are around the house and Kid A's teenaged feet are taking up all the room under the coffee table and he's slouching around like any fourteen-year-old, his long bony limbs flailing every which way as he runs into doorways. And then I see him next to an eight-year-old or something and I think, "Oh my WORD, he's an infant." It's the perception of a person prone to exaggeration, your almost five-year-old brother is either gigantic to me or teeny-weeny, depending on who he's with. (Much like when we drive through other National Forests, now that's we've lived here. You call this a forest, I snort. I mean, you can SEE the SKY above the trees. That's no forest.)

And you are the baby. The one most blessed, probably, because a lot of the mommy-kinks have been worked out of me. And you have your brother and sister above you, helping you, loving on you, sitting on you. Tormenting you. You want to be like them. You do what they do, repeat what they say like a little smooth-skinned wingless parrot. But then, you are yourself too. I walked into my room last night and found this:

"Oh Leafy Boy," I said. And then you gave me that happy look that says, I'm in heaven. Because there's nothing that you love more than music.

We gave your brother a little ukulele for Christmas when he was two, and it has moved around with us since then, gradually losing all its tuning pegs and strings, discarded, rarely played with. Until you. It became your favorite toy, and if there's anything that I'm kicking myself about not having on video, it's you, walking around holding your stringless ukulele, singing your strange songs. Sometimes you'd hold it backwards, but you'd still strum and sing. I guess if a stringless ukulele works for you, a backwards stringless ukulele will work just as well. Eventually you fell on top of it enough times and it broke. Even more than it was already broken, I mean.

And now you've found the DanElectro.



I sense a life of music ahead. I love your songs. You can sing them to me anytime, my Baby Leaf Boy.