Saturday, August 11, 2007

The Tough and Tender Years

I've been reading lots of parenting books over the past few months, books about parenting toddlers. At least 2 of them had "the tough and tender years" as part of the subtitle. Appropriate.

Tough:

  • Aimee's random tantrums outside grocery stores.
  • Her throwing full cups of juice and the sippy top breaking away from the bottom of the cup, right after I spent hours mopping all the floors in the house.
  • Her obsesssion with The Wiggles.
  • Trying to get her out of her "pretty" pajamas in the morning. She will hold her arms down and in her annoyed voice yell "PRETTY!".
  • The never ending requests she yells from her crib at bedtime, and that sometimes they are valid and other times just ploys to get me back in the room. "Diaper, Mommy!", "Juice!", "Song, Mommy!", "Read to you!", "Baby, Blankie".

Oh So Tender:

  • When she wakes up from her nap and asks for Grapes. "Greats?"
  • The sympathtic "Ohhhh...it's ok" she gives with her little head tilted to the side whenever one of her friends cries or has a tantrum.
  • When she gets into her white car and pretends to go somewhere. "Mommy! Bye-Bye! Store! Be back!" and how she frantically looks for her purse and keys before she leaves.
  • Her excitement when she gets to wear a new outfit and how she'll run into the room to show whoever hasn't seen her yet.
  • She loves to help me with laundry.
  • When she sits her baby down in the toy high chair, goes to the pantry for a packet of oatmeal and pretends to feed it to her, than does a complete diaper change along with declarations that her baby went "yucky poo-poo", or "Wow!" at how full the diaper is.
  • That she loves music so much that at my mom's church she started singing made up baby words to the communion song David played and made do the "I'm trying to control myself silent laugh" that caused me to get dirty looks from a few people.
  • When she fed Remmy a chicken nugget after I told her to stop it and just looked at me with her big brown eyes and very matter of factly said, "Mommy, I LOVE Remmy".
  • When she takes one of her bedtime books and starts to read it to me.

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