The Moana Chronicles, January 2011

Life with my two year old is still a heck of a lot of fun. I thought maybe I jinxed myself last month when I said that I didn't know what people were talking about when they said "Terrible Two's", but I didn't. Phew. Moana is still just the cutest little doll. Though now she is one that speaks. Loudly. And a lot. Not unlike a parrot, actually.

Today she was 'helping me' put on a pair of slippers. This made her very happy. She said, "I help Mama!" Yes, Moana, thank you for helping. You are a real help. Then after my slippers were successfully on my feet she said, "It's time to go home now, sweetheart." Which was especially funny because we were in my bedroom. And I never call her sweetheart. She must have gotten that from Grammy?

This afternoon I got home from my run and she was outside on our patio drawing with chalk. She was instructing Scott to draw a hexagon. Yes. She's two. She counted up the 6 sides and cheered for daddy, squealing Yay hexagon! Once again, I asked Scott, "Is she really requesting that you draw hexagons? That's a big word for a two year old, isn't it?" Then he said, Oh you should have heard her a little bit ago. She found a piece of glass outside and said that it was camouflaged. I had to use spell check on that one. Moana is now using words that Mama doesn't know how to spell. Perfect.

The other day after I picked her up at daycare I don't know what came over me, but I took her to Coldstone Creamery. I haven't been to Coldstone in probably 4 years, which means she has never been there... but she has had ice cream before and, um, it did not take her long to figure out what goes on in a place like that. ICE CREAM. YOU SCREAM. WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM. I now know where that chant came from. Oh my. I have never seen her happier. It was better than Christmas morning. Seriously.

The new bed thing has worked out perfectly, She's been a total champ about staying in it when she's supposed to. Once or twice we have caught her getting out of it so she could dig into her princess trunk... What's interesting about that is that as soon as she sees us she puts her little tail between her legs and dives right back into bed. So clearly she has an understanding about when she's supposed to stay in it. So far though, she has not made a single venture out of her room during night or nap time. I'm impressed.

What I'm not impressed with is her complete and utter lack of desire to sit on the potty. We were doing pretty well there for a while but then I really screwed it up when I attempted to bribe her to do it more consistently. Everyone said the bribing worked for their kids... and I am not opposed to giving her some M&M's sometimes... but once she figured out that it was important enough to me that I was willing to give her M&M's if she did it, well, she drew the line in the sand and just completely stopped cold turkey. So I backed off this issue and won't approach it again for a little while, and when I do, I'll be skipping the bribes. I wish that worked for us, but it did not. Go figure.

And speaking of drawing lines in the sand, this morning Moana and I were doing some of that at the beach... she was having a ball. I swear, taking her to the beach just gets better and better every week. Except that today she started wailing about an 'owie' on her foot (she does this a lot, especially in the middle of the night but 99% of the time she's crying wolf b/c she just wants a kiss from mama at 2AM and yes, I go in and kiss her foot. Then the other foot because that one always hurts too) so at first I was not especially responsive. But, turns out I was just being insensitive because she had huge welts on her foot, ankle and hand. Poor thing must have gotten a jellyfish or man-o-war? I didn't see one but the welts were proof enough for me. I've been stung by those things plenty of times and they do hurt like hell so I was worried for her. I call the doc to ask what I should do to help her... but then like 15 minutes later she was back to her smiling little happy self asking for Jamba Juice. Phew. So in good news, she's not allergic to man-o-war.

Unfortunately she still likes to eat sand. Not sure what's up with that?