Four-year-olds have the biggest personalities.
Maybe it is because they are starting to come into their own a bit--they are aware more, more confident in their surroundings and in who they are as a person. They are gaining some independence, doing things on their own. Whatever the cause, age four is such a fun time to witness. Tula is a prime example of this.
Tula has so much personality, she can’t stop at just one. She has different personas that she adopts to suit her mood, depending on the situation. When Mom or Dad has told Tula “no” (a less rare occurrence than one might assume), Tula will flee the room and “Talking Baby” will return. Talking Baby is a very stern character who verbalizes very well Tula’s feelings on not getting her way. She will say “I am Talking Baby. Tula didn’t like it when you told her no. It made her angry.”
It is difficult not to laugh when Talking Baby is lecturing you.
Yesterday, we put out a bounty for Gabriel’s missing tablet, the reward being a soda with lunch. Tula found it, and after a quite triumphant round of high-fives insisted her name reflect her success.
Me: Thank you for finding the tablet, Tula!
Tula: You mean…Super Tula?
Her superhero persona is called Stripes, who has no discernible superpowers but speaks in a deeper voice. She told me that Stripes is a hunter that provides for her family by hunting wolves and cows.
Where she gets this imagination is not hard to guess--we read at least four different books a day every day together. She picks one and I pick one before nap and bedtime. She will usually pick “one we already read” (her words) while I pick a new one. Her favorites are about dogs (like “Hallo-weiner” and “Dog Breath” by Dav Pilkey), the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems, and Little Critter by Mercer Meyer, but she reads a big variety. Anytime you ask her if she wants to read a book, she grabs a whole stack and sets up camp, waiting to see how many you’ll be willing to read because she won’t get tired of it. There are some words she reads on her own, the shorter ones like “no” and “go”, and she recognizes all the letters, knows the letter sounds. She can spell her own name, and Mom and Dad, but cannot write yet.
It is a miracle that she actually even knows her name, because she rarely ever hears it. When I was pregnant with her, I expected we would call her Tula or TJ. As nicknames go, you don’t always have that much control--more often than not, she is called Toots, a moniker I am sure she does not want following her into grade school. But she is just as likely to be called Tu or Tutu or Tula Rue or T-Rex, Toodles, T-Bone, Teeter-Totter, or any other T word that occurs to me at the given moment. When she was a baby, she had the curliest little blonde hair so I called her Noodle, a nickname that stuck when she got taller but not any wider. This basis of confusion led to this conversation over Christmas.
Tula: My name is spelled T-U-L-A.
Pawpaw: Yeah! What is your last name?
Tua, thinking: ….Oodles of Noodles!
(As a note, none of my children have escaped the nickname thing, which is why I call Emerald “Strawbebby”, Benjamin “Banjo”, and Gabriel “Google Docs”.)
Tula has a complicated relationship with food, but what four year old isn’t a picky eater? Her favorite meal, the one she asks for every single time we need to eat, is “chips and sandwich!” She will eat avocado every chance you give her, and likes sour cream but not ketchup.
If you want to know all her favorite foods, take her to the zoo--she has named all the animals after her favorites, from Popcorn the albino Burmese python and Lunchable the Hognose something or other. Her very most favorite animal at the zoo though is the porcupine she renamed Burger. (The two she saw at the Little Rock Zoo she declared were Chicken and French Fries.)
When you give her food she really likes, you can tell because she has this happy little food dance she unconsciously does while eating. This is something she has inherited from her very favorite person, Aunt Amber, who Tula reminds me of for one reason or another nearly every day.
Tula is so sweet and so funny. She’s so frustrating because she screams when she doesn’t get her way and it is the most piercing sound. She is a grade five clinger, and would be happiest if I just velcroed her to my body and walked around like that all day long. Her happiest places are swimming or in bubbly baths, jumping in puddles after it rains, and the fantasy destination of going to the beach someday. A water bottle goes with her everywhere she goes. She is a bright spot in the world, this joyous, disastrous, wondrous little girl.
Four years ago today, we almost lost her.
Today, diabetes doesn’t bother her. She has literally never known a time when she didn’t get finger pokes and shots. Her sister having to go through it too has made it a bit easier, too. There are some physical signs that she struggles with it. For example, her toes where she gets her blood glucose checked are a little scruffy, and she’s got some knots in her arms where she has had too many insulin injections. Even though she has gotten taller, she hasn’t really gained weight since she was about two so she’s just long and skinny.
It is kind of interesting, I get asked a lot how I knew that Tula had diabetes. Frankly, we didn’t know until she was already in DKA. But I always tell them: the weight loss. You can get up in your head and start fretting about how much water they are drinking or how much they are urinating, but without significant weight loss I usually don’t jump to diabetes. (I never mind people asking; I like being able to help. The other two things I say are watch for signs of dehydration even if they’re drinking that much, and if you are still worried, glucometers are cheap over-the-counter at all major pharmacies; buy one and check.) But that is why we don’t worry too much about Tula not really gaining weight; it kinda goes with the condition.
Tula can’t remember that time, thank goodness. But I have come to dread this time of year because those beautiful, awful pictures of her…it takes me back, makes me relive it. At the time, I was calmed and focused. You do what you gotta do to take care of the kid. After the shock had worn off, after the dust had settled, that’s when I started to fall apart. I had intense panic attacks and had to seek treatment for PTSD. Little things would set me off--a certain shade of purple, an accumulation of ice, the smell of Pantene shampoo.
It was one of the worst days of my life.
Which feels hideous and self-centered of me to say. I mean, it wasn’t happening to me. It wasn’t about me--it never was. It was about this brave, beautiful, perfect little girl that loves to read books and dances when she eats guacamole and could sit by Burger the Porcupine’s enclosure all day. I am so very blessed and thankful to know Tula, little less to be her mom because she is amazing.
That’s why I wanted to write today. I saw a video of Tula in my memories on Facebook, her eyes puffy from crying, her face so pale even with her chapped cheeks, idly scratching at the IV cast she had on her arm. We had gotten one of the two IVs removed, so she was a bit more mobile, and I could give her a bath. They had given me tubes of Eucerin to rub on her dry cheeks, and she was wearing a black Cooks Childrens t-shirt and a diaper. The video captured her first smile in days. Emerald had decorated her crib with streamers for New Year’s Eve.
With that smile blossomed hope. That our she was going to be okay, which meant we might be, too.
Happy New Years, everyone. May your day be filled with joy and laughter and all your very most favorite things.
Love,
The Weardens
