Before the speaker tells us anything the child will do, they give her a face: "Brown hair, / Hazel eyes, / A smile like the sun." These three lines have no verb. They read like a caption under a photograph, so for a moment we think we are looking at a real girl. Then the fourth line begins "She'd love to sing and dance for us," and the spell shifts. Everything from here on is conditional: she'd love, she'd run, "if she ever fell." The title, "Alex Rue", reads like a name, presumably the one given to this imagined child, though the poem never says so. What we are reading is a portrait of someone who does not yet exist, drawn with the confidence of someone who already loves her.
The central idea is that love can arrive before the person does. The speaker is not describing a child but inventing one, and the invention is built from two people. Twice the poem splits into a "like me" and a "like you." If she's like the speaker, she will fall out of a tree and laugh it off. If she's like the other parent, the speaker won't have a spare minute. The child becomes a mixture of two temperaments, and the poem is partly a love letter to the person being addressed, who is imagined as the source of all that energy and trouble. The poem doesn't say which of the two is "daddy", so the reader has to decide.
The form suits this. There is no regular meter and the lines run long and short as thoughts occur. The voice is closer to talking than to writing: "(duh)," "Oh, and," "Cause." The parentheses work like asides whispered across a table. "And have more hoodies than she should. (duh)" is a joke that assumes the listener already knows the speaker's habits. Rhyme appears only now and then, which makes it noticeable when it does. "Tree" and "me" click together in the middle of the poem. The closing "hands" and "plans" are a near-rhyme that shuts the poem with a small, satisfied snap.
The details are chosen for charm rather than grandeur. Green apples are a more particular favorite than "fruit" would be, and the hoodies, the drawing and the dogs are the stuff of an ordinary, specific childhood. The line "anytime she sees a dog / We'll be hearing her name it all day long" captures a small child announcing every animal she passes, and the "we" quietly makes the listener a fellow parent in the future being described. The one simile, "a smile like the sun," is the plainest line in the poem. It is the sort of comparison anyone would reach for, and its plainness feels honest. Some feelings don't need fresh wording.
The most striking moment is the one line spoken by the child: "Don' worry daddy, I fine!" The dropped letters and the missing "am" give her a toddler's voice, and she is the only one in the poem who speaks for herself. The speaker has been describing her for a dozen lines, and now she interrupts. It also reverses the usual roles: she has just fallen out of a tree, and she is the one reassuring the adult. The speaker's own habit of laughing off a fall (the "if she's like me" in brackets) seems to live on in her.
The ending turns the poem from sweetness toward comedy. "I'll have almost no time on my hands" bends the idiom, since the speaker's hands will be full with a child. The last line, "To remember that I made plans," is the poem's quiet joke. The plans were made by a version of the speaker who hadn't met her yet. There is no complaint in it, though. The speaker lists the lost schedule almost proudly, and the tone suggests they would trade it gladly.
The poem is slight and informal, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. Its significance lies in what it does with that small scale: it shows that a poem can be addressed to someone who isn't there, and that tenderness and humor can sit in the same line without either spoiling the other. It also catches how people in love picture a future, which is rarely in grand terms and more often in hoodies, dogs, scraped knees and cancelled plans.