Maggie’s mission: bring everything to daycare

Maggie is now 23 months old and has decided that her goals in life are to have her dolls/toys with her at all time and force any adult to put on Elmo for her. While daycare still claims they had nothing to do with brainwashing our daughter into the Cult of Elmo, I’m pretty sure she didn’t just randomly get it from the little Sesame Street she watched at home.

The past couple of days have been a fight since the time change. We’ve had major problems getting her up in the morning, I think she’s having some sort of nighttime symptoms as well as her sleep is disturbed and I’m once again coming in to comfort her on a fairly regular basis, and things just seem to have been off.

Waking up I’m being told “no, night night” when I try to get her out of bed and when I eventually have to force the issue there are tears of frustration and annoyance that I picked her out of bed and removed a very loaded diaper.

In this time she’s decided that she’s going to bring everything with her at all times everywhere. I’ve had to hide dolls and pacifiers, I gave up the fight on a necklace a couple of days ago, and today she wouldn’t leave the house without a Hello Kitty bag.

I thought I could get the bag back from her in the daycare parking lot by telling her she had to walk as I wasn’t going to carry the bag. That didn’t work. She toddled into daycare with a Hello Kitty bag and we wandered about the place trying to find where all her classmates went as they weren’t in the normal area.

My goal at the moment is to spend the weekend figuring out a way to disarm a toddler heading to daycare of her weapons of distraction, and perhaps introduce her to something that’s not Elmo that she can be interested in as the Elmo obsession is just kind of odd.

I mean, I would understand it more if she was watching the entire time, but she just wants Elmo on and then she ignores it. Then again when she’s playing with other toddlers the general rule seems to be ignore each other but play, so maybe she thinks it’s a friend of hers.

Who knows.