The Love-Frustrate Relationship with Toddlerdom.

Elena became "willful" as Josh and I liked to say a bit before her first birthday.  Overall, she has been great (remember my comment yesterday about her flushing the toilet for me after I puked?).  But the past few weeks have been challenging.  Mornings have become wrought with tears, throwing herself down on the floor and refusing to go into her early care classroom (which was a barrier we had just overcome a short time before then), and lots of meltdowns upon returning home (if not in the car).

To be frank, I'm not in the mood.  In the past week I've developed some annoying twitchy type pain in my low belly which has caused me to walk a LOT slower than usual and with a bit of a waddle.  I've got just enough energy to grab her shoes and sit down and say, "Come put your shoes on please."  And that's it.  I just repeat my plea, becoming more and more desperate each time.  And she's listening less and less.

I still love her, and giggle even at her observations that, from anyone older, might be insulting.  For example, she was rubbing my heels a while back and looked up and said, "Mommy crunchy."  True.  And a few days later she was rubbing my armpits, suddenly getting a furrowed brow as she whined, "Owie!  Owie!!"  I guess she tells it like it is... I just thought it wouldn't happen before her second birthday.

Anyway, back to this new stage of toddlerdom.  I think people give advice to ignore tantrums because by the time tantrums happen, parents are just so fed up it's just about the only thing to do.  I get Parenting magazine (mysteriously, since I never subscribed to it), and the other day came across a new issue whose cover featured the story: "The Terrible Twos: A Myth?"  The actual headline on the cover was lacking in the question mark and made it sound like it was definitely a myth.  The article basically says that it's more of 1-4 that is terrible, depending on your kid.  Great.

So in the meantime, I'm just going to enjoy the sweeter moments of toddlerdom, like the way she clings to certain things that I've said.  We read Toot & Puddle every night, and I must have said something in the way of a warning to Toot as he lounged in the water with a bunch of hippos in Africa.  Each time we get to that illustration she says, "Watch out!  Hippos bite you!"

After reading, I turn the lights off and tell her stories from my childhood.  She's gotten sick of stories about "the little girl" and opts more for stories of "the little boy" which are modeled after my brother Neil's experiences.  I've told her about the GI Joe Notarianni yard finger smash story (for days after she kept saying, "Boy hurt finger.  Rock."), the time when the babysitter lost Neil, the time when we lost our hamster in the yard, Neil's baseball career playing for Buco Insurance, the murals Neil painted in high school, and a few other gems.  The one she likes the best is the story of how I brought home the chicken pox (I just made Neil's reaction really dramatic to make him the star of the story).  In reality, I've only told it twice.  But the other day we were driving home from school and she told me, "I scratchy."  I asked her if she meant that she was itchy and she replied, "Chicken pox!"  I hope not--she just got her first varicella vaccine a couple of weeks ago.

5 more weeks of my baby being my baby before we get a new baby.  I'll do my best to tune out all the tantrums, and bask in the fact that she can enunciate quite clearly, "I don't like it!"

Toddlers.