A morning and evening with my two year old
ITMama is out watching New Kids on the Block with a friend, and I was at home with the little two year one month old. Things have changed a lot in the past couple of months. There’s less frustration and more understanding that she can point and ask for help and if she doesn’t get it that there’re things to do other than crying.
Tonight I realized how much things had changed. I’ll start with this morning however.
Morning
Woke up a bit later than average as I was not feeling particularly 100% this morning. Nothing wrong, just a bit beat with the weather. Maggie wasn’t crying, but when she heard me upstairs poking around she started yelling “mommy daddy mommy daddy.”
I got there a bit later than I wanted, but I rushed to get downstairs to her. She wasn’t really upset, she was just calling and informing me she was awake. This was somewhat new. There’s never been a call that wasn’t urgent. This was not urgent, just repeated.
We got her dressed and ready in record time. I needed to get her to daycare so she could get fed. They’ll feed her if I get there later than 8, but if I’m too late she’s skipping a meal or eating it with me at the car.
At daycare she asked to be sat down outside to walk. She walked up to several spinny flowers and asked that I fix one or two of them. The flowers fixed, she hugged a couple, and decided to march in to daycare.
Spinning flower video from a couple of days ago follows
She got to the first door, she’s too short to trigger the open sensor. I got there and it opened. She got to the second door and watched as I entered the code. She mouthed off numbers that were not the code, but they were the amount of numbers I was pressing so that was fun.
She walked in to her room, asked me to open the gate, and walked to her teacher to be placed in the baby boardroom seating for food. The report says she ate everything. That’s also unusual. I said bye to her. A week ago I’d said this and there were tears and anguish. Today she just waved and started playing with another friend at the table.
It was an odd morning.
The evening
Mama had made her some of her favorites / easy food / stuff to give dad to feed a child that would not result in massive cleanup efforts. There was a bath involved. And it looked like there was going to be a rather long set of baby fights before the inevitable fight to get her to bed sometime around seven.
Bathtime was odd. There was no fight getting out of the tub, the only issue was that she was trying to tell me when putting on her diaper that she wanted some baby butt cream and didn’t realize I knew she needed it. Evidently telling a 25 month old “I know what you’re asking for, you’re going to get it, give me a minute to get this diaper down under you first” doesn’t translate well.
We watched the Chica show, she really wanted to see that and I didn’t have a problem with it. It’s short, colorful, and something a stressed out toddler can wind down to after a hard day of baby work. She wanted to sit with me on the couch and point at various things on the screen. I’m not really sure what she was talking about, but every now and then something would pop up that I’d understand, I’d repeat it, and she’d be very happy with that.
She asked for some juice, I got it. She said a little later in very clear words “I gotta pee.” This is new. The phrase before was “potty,” or “I potty.” This was very clear. We got it out, sat her down. She once again didn’t do anything. I realized that once again she’d peed in her diaper and then said she needed to go to the potty. We’ll have to work on that.
We played with the buckle turtle for a while, and I made myself a bachelor pizza and made her a mini version of it (well, I cut mini slices for her.) We had one small drink accident that I don’t know what was caused by, but she demanded a towel.
We had on some random show, she wasn’t paying a bit of attention to as she was wrapped up in the turtle again today. She showed me she’d mastered one of the buckle styles, seemed pretty stoked about that.
She ran around the house for about three minutes like a mad woman asking for her friend Brooke and her mom. She didn’t seem upset that they weren’t there, just wanted to cover the bases in case they were there. This is when things got kind of odd.
She looked at me and said “book.” I asked her if she was saying “book,” “Brooke,” or “milk.” Sometimes it’s a bit difficult to understand with her as she’s not really hitting the right emphasis yet. She said “book” again and pointed more or less to the general area that books are kept.
She ran and got on the couch, got her turtle again, I asked her a few titles of the books and she wanted to hear Dora’s Book of Manners ($0.13 on Amazon, can’t beat that except how we did where it just showed up.) I got the book and started reading to her.
After a couple of pages she said “night night,” and rolled over and pretended to sleep. I asked her if she was ready for bed or wanted some milk. She said she was ready for night night which I assumed meant bed.
I walked into her room, got her sleeping gear ready (currently this is a My Pal Violet, couple of items that look like handkerchiefs, and a blanket.) I started to rock her a bit and she looked at me and said “scratch.”
I put her down, scratched her back for a minute, she played one of the songs on her My Pal Violet and then rolled over. I asked her if she wanted anything and was dismissed with a “night night,” but a nice one.
No fights, other than when diaper cream was to be applied, no anything I would have expected from the past two years of knowing this baby.
It feels a bit like my baby’s been replaced.
