Do you know Kate?

Maybe you have a Kate in your family. (Ah, but you couldn’t because ours is so……Kate) Kate is 3rd in a family of 4 children. All the nurses in the hospital told me “My 3rd was the EASIEST baby.” I couldn’t believe it but it was true. When I brought her home, she didn’t make a peep. She did projectile vomit-but never complained about it. The summer she was born, we went to the beach with my mom and by brothers and their families. A house full of people and nobody could believe how QUIET she was.

Well then I think she got tired of being ignored-I’ll have to admit, when your 3rd and easy,the other kids get things first and more often. At 18 months, she did a 180. She was still sweet but not quiet anymore. Her voice became the loudest when she needed something. I was just saying to her the other day that when she’s arguing with the others, I hear her and she usually gets in trouble for it-sorry Kate-my ears don’t like loud.

Kate almost wasn’t a “Kate”. Her name probably had more debate than any of the kids. It’s a good thing, too, because it fits her so well. Her real name is “Kathryn Virginia” (after a favorite aunt of mine) but “Kate” is so her.

Kate has an interesting birth story. The day she was born was “take your daughter to work day”. I rode the elevator up with my doc who had his daughter with him. I asked if she was going to see a baby being born today and he was so surprised. Apparently, he wasn’t dreaming of asking any of his patients for that privilege. So he said, “do you think she could?” and Kate had her first audience.

Kate is nurturing and funny, creative, generous, dramatic and a linguist (she makes up her own words-that actually work). One of the reasons that she and her brother, Mark are so close is that she’s always anticipating his needs and taking care of him-they fight, too, but I know her caring is genuine.

She cracks me up-she wears 2 different colored crocs and sometimes 2 altogether different shoes. People might think she’s doing it for attention-she’s not at all, she just likes it and honestly, so do I. I think it appeals to her artsy side and-it’s her. Any adult can make Kate laugh by saying a potty word-it cracks her up.

She’s horrified by nakedness. She doesn’t even like to see the boys with their shirts off-she thinks they’re flashing. We made the mistake of going to “Hooters” on vacation one year because they were showing a Steelers game and she almost couldn’t eat. But that was funny, too. This preference could have gone either way-she’s the one who came into the kitchen one day with the “Pretty Pretty Princess” earring on her belly-she was 3.

Kate could be an actress but doesn’t like the stage-so she’ll have to settle for Hollywood, I guess.

Here are some of her made-up words…

“Delicious this” this she told me at 2 meant to take a bite of something and say “Mmm Delicious”

“Shiver me up” this meant to pick her up in my arms and say “oooh” and sort of shiver. I don’t think at that point she knew the word “shiver”.

and a more recent one…”Come-offable”, meaning “removable”.

Kate would give all her money to the poor box at church if I let her-I don’t know why I don’t. Instead, she sort of spreads it out over the year. She used to take her change in a little change purse and dump it into the collection basket every week. She always takes extra coins for Mark, too.

Kate loves flowers and babies. She’d ask to go for walks around the neighborhood and either check off nature things that I had drawn or take pictures of the neighbors’ flowers. I can still hear her mini gasp as she saw the next one. “Uh” or “Oh, look at that one”. Those photos are impossible to purge from the computer-for practical and nostalgic reasons. She loves to feed the seagulls at the beach-she’s like a little St. Francis. By the end of the week, I’m certain those birds recognize her. They come swarming around as soon as they see that purple hat step out of the house.

Every morning Kate looks at me from her bed and flips herself over, violently sometimes, so that I can rub her back. She was like a little lion cub as a baby. If I was on the floor, she’d roll all over me, it was like she couldn’t get close enough.

Kate’s always finding things. She always finds coins and interesting things on the ground. One of her favorite things to do at the beach is find shells with her dad. She finds more 4-leaf clovers in the yard than anyone.

My mom watches my nieces. When she first agreed to take the job, she asked my older daughter, Hannah, if she could help sometimes. Kate, who was almost 8 at the time, thought she could do the job. I let her try and she was just as good with them. She’s always making up games for them-like treasure hunts and thinking of ways to help them do something. When the older niece was going to be a flower girl in a wedding, Kate made a little flower crown and collected a basket full of flowers to help her practice-and it helped.

Finally, the thing Kate probably loves to do most is DRAW! She’s so good at it, too. I wish I had her eye and imagination. She’s been drawing for as long as she could hold a pencil-I’m certain Hannah’s love and aptitude for it rubbed off naturally on Kate. I’m a relentless purger and it’s the one thing I can’t bring myself to pitch-the kids’ drawings. They have notebooks and drawing pads and stacks of looseleaf paper full of drawings. She and Hannah fill both sides of good art notebooks. To watch them draw is fascinating because I’m not especially capable of it. It’s incredible how the pencil moves and creates the things exactly as it’s in their brain. I don’t watch them draw often enough. For me, keeping all their work is proof that the process is more important than the product-but in their case, the product is also pretty impressive. I’d include some pictures that Kate has drawn here, but that would be bragging.

Kate is a character. She’s her own person and I really hope that doesn’t change.