Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Life in the Terrible Twos...

Such a precious face, it is true...
Yes, I know that my daughter is *3*, but all of us parents know the truth, right? The Terrible Twos are actually not encapsulated during a child's second year of life. In my experience, this is the way that it goes:

*your child turns 2*

"Is some terrible switch flipped on their second birthday, because so far he seems fine? Maybe I just got really lucky."

*INSERT REALLY LOUD SNORT RIGHT HERE*

*child grows from 2 to 2.5 years of age*

"Wow! This is awesome! I mean, sure, he's a handful, but he's SO sweet! I must just have an extremely sweet child. No Terrible Twos over here!"

*Sometime before the 3rd birthday...WHAM!*

"Wait, what?! What on earth...?!"

Yep, there it is. Your sweet, adorable child suddenly turns two faced and regularly morphs into a snarling, feral creature who wants to eat garbage and drink their own bath water. They seem bent on making your waking moments (and there are many of them, since your creature suddenly also stops sleeping) as filled with misery as humanly possible. They scream in an eardrum piercing fashion and throw themselves on the floor. They break things for spite. They loudly refuse to cooperate with any request that comes from your lips. They embarrass you in public. You are reduced to occasionally curling into a fetal position and wondering why God hates you so much.

THAT is the Terrible Twos. And it usually happens when the child is, or nearly is, 3, and lasts until they are 4. Then other stuff happens, but let's not worry about that now. :0

Our precious Anne is following the protocol for her species right according to plan. A week or so ago she starting showing the Terrible Two symptoms, and now we are right in the throes of it. Here we have a Exhibit A, from yesterday evening:

*cute green Honda Civic pulls into our garage*

*Anne comes running outside*

"Mommy! So nice to meet you!" (translation: I'm very happy to see you! Cute, right?)

"Hi Sweetheart, I think we've met before." ;-) "How was your day?"

"Mommy, I missed you SO MUCH!" *enthusiastic kiss* *takes my hand*

Now see? This is where the lulling into a false sense of security comes into play. Subsequently, we have:

(1) Refusal to eat dinner, complete with crying heap on the floor. "Mommy, I DON'T LIKE THIS!! I am NEVER going to eat this!!!!!"

(2) Tantrum thrown about permission not being granted to use blue sidewalk chalk *in the house* following her bath. This involved 20 minutes of sobbing on the staircase landing and a clawing of her wet hair into something straight out of "The Exorcist."

(3) Final insult: A refusal to go to sleep complete with climbing out of crib. "Mommy, I am NOT sleepy. I am NEVER going to sleep!!!" Notice the theme?

*Mommy drinks wine*

Ugh.

The evenings have been a bit of a challenge lately over at the home of the Catholic Librarian. Suggestions for making it through this? Besides more wine? Anybody, anybody?

;-)

1 comment:

  1. In my experience, the worst ages so far have been 18-24 months and 3 ..... pretty much all of 3, but especially the first half. Two was smooth sailing. My mom says the opposite, so all I can say is either different kids go through this stuff at different stages .... or some kids (and their parents!) adapt better to some ages than others. In retrospect each of my kids had challenges at two as well, but those were no big deal to me for some reason. I felt like I knew how to handle them. But Marko at three? I was totally broadsided by that.

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