Cordelia is Four!

Cordelia is four! Her birthday was on Sunday, and we celebrated all day. In the morning, we had two kinds of pancakes (thin and fat), and then we went out to Word on the Street for some literary fun. We saw the TVOKids folks (again), got some (more) TVOKids swag, had lunch (chicken and hot dog), visited the This and Spacing magazine booths, bought some TTC station buttons from Spacing (Davisville, Museum, Dupont and Dundas), and listened to stories. Then we visited Daddy and his geeky friends at U of T. We all rode the TTC home, and then lots of people came over for Cordelia's birthday tea.

Instead of having a kid party for Cordelia, I invited family and friends: Baba and Zaida, Morgan and Erik, Douglas and Tanya and Ursa and Otis, Sara and Blair and (more importantly) Henry and Liam, and Kat. If you do that math you'll see I didn't do myself any favours; we ended up with thirteen people over, but everyone managed to get themselves tea or coffee or beer, and we didn't run out of cake, so I call that a win.

For her birthday, Cordelia got a Schylling balloon mobile and glow in the dark stars to decorate her bedroom, some cool markers and a sticker book, a book of foam shapes, and Lauren Child's creepy interpretation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Those were all from me (bought with money from my mum. Hooray Mum!) She also got a jewellery-making kit and a sticker book from Henry, and a very cute outfit from Kat, but the pièce de résistance was a homemade robot outfit from Tanya and Ursa. Cordelia loves to play robot: "I am a ro-obot!". I will post a picture.

Cordelia isn't as independent as I remember Delphine being at four. In fact, she's very needy: she doesn't like to do things for herself if she thinks there is any way she can get you to do them, and she often pretends something is too hard when I know she can manage it.

She's also clingy, but not in a fearful way. She doesn't cry when we're separated, but she's very happy to see me when we reunite. She seems to prefer my company to anything else. I said to another mom today, "No-one loves me as much as Cordelia does." I haven't re-read the Four book so I don't know if this is expected behaviour. As I said, I don't remember it with Delphine, but then we spent the four months after she turned four together, so maybe it simply didn't come up.

The other day Cordelia and I went to the school to pick Delphine up after school. Cordelia was very excited to see one of her classmates, Zoe, in the schoolyard. She ran after Zoe, but the other girl didn't see her. Cordelia came back to me, disappointed. "She didn't even see me!" I told her to try again, so she ran up again, and again Zoe was walking away as Cordelia approached and so didn't notice her. Once again I encouraged her to try again, so she ran up to Zoe and planted herself in front of her with a giant grin, kind of a "Boo!" move. Zoe just stared at her, and turned away. And my heart cracked.

That's the kind of approach that would work great on a Baba or Zaida or grown-up friend, so maybe she just needs to figure out some approaches for people her own age who aren't won over by extreme cuteness. We've been (mildly) concerned about Cordelia's social skills for a while—she didn't play with other kids much at nursery school, but was happy playing by herself. I'm not sure (again) what a four-year-old is expected to manage, socially. I will talk to her teacher about it in a few weeks after she's had a chance to get to know the kids better.

Cordelia is delightful. She is almost always happy (although sometimes she is very angry), she is agreeable, she is voluble, she is clever. She likes to make things, arrange things, draw and colour. She can run very fast. She knows the whole alphabet. She still says "f" for "th", and "naybe" for "maybe". She likes silly things: silly noises, silly pictures, silly stories. Cordelia is a ray of sunshine.

(Here's my post about Delphine's fourth birthday for fun. Cordelia chose lemon icing for her cake, too!)