What Will She Be Like?

Knowing your kid today and looking back to her younger days, it is very easy to find the child of today in the baby of yesterday. But what's the challenge in that? Much more fun and interesting to take a swing at her future self and see how right you are in 10 years. My little girl is going to be 3 years old tomorrow, so now is as good a time as any to make my predictions.

Anya is unfazed by physical danger. She climbs fearlessly and endlessly. Yesterday I came into the bathroom and she was standing on back of the toilet braced against the window ledge reaching for a shelf to get down her hand stamps. She terrifies me a little every day. To her credit she still (thank God) has never fallen during one of her climbing escapades. Our photographer Judith called her a little mountain goat after her birthday shoot the other day. Very apropos.

She's good-natured. She wakes up in a good mood pretty much every day (not so much so for overly short naps). She always wants to play and run, and several times in a 3 hour period she'll get so excited she'll resort to jumping up and down in place and squealing.

She wants to do things for herself...and for you. She will generally refuse help on tasks she knows how to do (like putting on her shoes) and she'll generally refuse to listen to your requests for autonomy when there are eggs to be cracked in the kitchen or dogs to be fed up stairs.

She's empathetic. If you or one of the animals get's hurt she is very quick to soothe (although, thanks to a misguided attempt to calm her when she wasn't really hurt she thinks the right thing to say as I roll on the ground clutching my groin is "It's okay daddy!")

She is extremely willful. Still not sure if that is a prominent feature of her personality or if she's just being a 3 year-old. This may serve her very well in life, as she seems to be a loving friendly and kindhearted kid, but if she ever strays toward the dark side, the world best watch out.

She gets frustrated very easy. Once again not sure if this is just being 3, or if it is core to who she is. She has both extreme patience and short-fused frustration in her blood (not saying which side is which) so we'll have to see. I'm trying to teach her to simply ask for help when she needs it rather than getting upset. That works some times.

She is, as always, extremely talkative. But more than that, she shows an unusual ability for complex thought. Just tonight, we were driving by a neighbor's house to see if they had hung up a Halloween decoration we had left them on their door step. Anya said "Maybe someone we didn't know came by Monica and Brian's house and took the Halloween present we left them." And then there is my current favorite thing she said last week, "Ursala the Sea Witch steals my dreams and feeds them to a monster so that I don't have any dreams left," which is both a little terrifying and amazingly detailed thought for a not-quite three year old.

I also love it when she says things like, "I'm keeping my eyes out for airplane contrails".

If I were to guess on a path for her. It would have to do with words, ideas, and adventure. Me thinks something like what we call today a "Foreign Correspondent" a job which will likely seem quaint to her by the time she has its future equivalent in 24 years.