Happy Birthday, Charlotte! - Grandparents.com

The party was going to be small. Or so they told me. A little celebration. Family. A few friends. “Charlotte’s just 1, after all. We’ll have a cake and some ice cream,” my daughter said, and her husband agreed.

But then they decided to have sandwiches. “Can you make six dozen? Egg, tuna, and chicken salad?” I was asked. I placed the sandwiches on trays on their dining-room table next to the chips and dips, the hummus and carrots, the pretzels, the nuts, the deviled eggs, and a huge tossed green salad.

Drinks were on the porch. Juice. Soda. Beer. Wine.

So much for a small party.

Maybe there weren’t 100 people in my daughter’s backyard last month on the only sunny Saturday April saw. Maybe there were just 75. Who could count? The yard was full of little kids swinging and sliding and zip-lining from tree to tree and playing Wiffle ball and running, their parents and grandparents standing around watching.

Charlotte, the birthday girl, took it all in. She sat like a princess in her birthday chair and observed the goings-on. She wasn’t walking yet. She was watching. Watch and learn we say.

And, oh, how she did.

Her brother, Adam, practiced walking for months before he struck out on his own. He held on to walls and chairs, then to a little toy grocery cart, which he wheeled cautiously around the house.

Charlotte, on the other hand, stood up a few days after her birthday and began bulldozing her way from room to room, full speed ahead, cruising, yes, but well over the speed limit. Walk. Fall. Get up. Try again. Walk. Fall. Get up. Try again. She didn’t mind falling. She was as intrepid as a Marine.

Now, a few weeks later, she is a full-fledged walker. “Walking baby girlfriend!” we call her, smiling and clapping our hands at her great accomplishment. She grins, but only a little. She’s too busy getting from place to place to sit and bask in our praise.

She’s figured out how to climb, too. Up the single step that separates the kitchen from the office. Down the single step. Up the step. Down the step.

None of my three children did any of this. They all preferred talking to walking.

Not Charlotte. But why talk when you can point? “Dat!” she says, stabbing at the air, like an accusatory trial lawyer, in the direction of a lone banana resting on the kitchen counter. “Do you want a banana, Charlotte?”

“Dat!” she repeats and we sit her in her high chair, peel the banana, break it in two and give it to her. She squishes it with both hands until it is mush, then stuffs every bit into her mouth.

“Dat!” she says pointing to a box of cereal. We put Cheerios on her tray and she scoops them up, not in a ladylike way, not one by one. She grabs all of them — think of a kid playing jacks — and fills her face until her cheeks bulge.

“Dat!” she says, pointing to her sippy cup, then guzzles her water the way a man who has been mowing lawns and wacking weeds and working in the sun all day would guzzle a beer.

And then she points at the cereal again.

We laugh. She is our entertainment, our very own sitcom.

She sees her brush on the floor under the table and points at it. “Dat!” And we get it for her and she takes it with sticky fingers and cheeks and Cheerios on her chin, and with uncharacteristic grace, proceeds to gently, and coyly, brush her hair.

Charlotte is my third grandchild. I shouldn’t be so surprised by the things she does. But I am always surprised and humbled and grateful and renewed when I’m around her.

Because there is no one else in the world like her. Never before and never again. No duplicating her. One of a kind. That’s the miracle and magic of children.

Everything they do is as ancient as creation. But everything they do is a first, too, for them and for us.

“Dat!” Up the step. Down the step. Squished bananas. “Happy birthday to you.”

Old song. New singer. And, as always, the melody is grand.