First Birthday Boy Invitations
Tad Lincoln’s Early Years
Thomas Lincoln, immediately nicknamed Tad, was the fourth and last child born to Abraham and Mary Lincoln. It was a difficult birth, with hours of labor, requiring two doctors to attend.
Whether the birthing difficulties were responsible or not, Tad was born with a cleft palate, something routinely repaired today. It wasn’t fixable in 1853, so Tad would have a speech defect, making him hard to understand. He would also show signs early on of what today might be classified as some youthful dyslexia, coupled with attention deficit. But he had a sunny, mischievous temperament, and was clearly not retarded, so his lenient parents encouraged him to be a boy as long as possible.
His brother Robert, older by ten years, was by Tad’s earliest memory, away at prep school. Little Eddie had died years before, and Willie, older by two-and-a-half-years, would become his best friend and boon companion. As the two younger boys were growing up, their father had established himself as a fairly prominent attorney, which meant he did not need to travel as much as he had when Robert was a small boy. Now in his middle forties, Lincoln was truly able to discover the joys of being a father to little boys.
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