Life As We Know It
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Friday, July 27, 2001
A couple of days ago, Kyle learned to blow raspberries & bubbles with his mouth--blowing both with & without his tongue sticking out--and delighted in doing so whenever I tried to feed him solid food! Not only that, but it really seemed like he realized he was being silly, and was trying to be funny. He and I both cracked up laughing at each other, and we still do whenever he tries it--though I haven't been trying as many solids right now! He still isn't really interested in them at all.
As for Ryan, he's really funny and also talking well, but still being a bit of a toddler tyrant. About a year ago, he would ask for something and then have a fit if we gave it to him! (Or if we didn't--we couldn't win.) Now he doesn't seem to do that anymore, but he does have a fit over the way we give him things. For instance, if he's looking for something and we find it, he may be happy, or he may get hysterical and insist that he wanted to find it! In some cases he even puts the item back where we found it, and re-finds it himself. It's tricky knowing when to put our feet down. On one hand, we don't want him running the household & telling us what to do. On the other hand, we don't want to cause major standoffs & meltdowns over unimportant things. What's best is when we can anticipate the potential problem and avoid it altogether...but with a 2-year-old, it's nearly impossible to predict what he's going to get upset over! There are times when, if we make a joke or say something silly, he'll think it's hilarious, and other times when it upsets him, because "that's not right!" And while we often repeat back to him what he has said, to let him know we understood, that sometimes backfires. He held something up to me yesterday and said, "This has two holes in it." I said, "Oh yeah, it has two holes," and he got upset and said, "No, I were talking about it!" Ugh. He also repeats the same questions over & over again, even though he usually knows the answers already. The main ones are "What's I touching?" or "What's I holding?" which are his ways of saying, "What is this?" Half the time we can't even see what it is since it's not in our line of vision, but even if we can it is maddening after the 5th or 6th time and I just stop trying to answer. The other big question the other day, while watching Clifford, was "What's Emily Elizabeth wearing on her feet?" He must have asked that 15 times that day. The correct answer was "socks and shoes," by the way! He did one thing today that surprised me. I put blue shorts on him (no protests this time about wanting to dress himself...) and gave him a choice of two shirts to wear. They both matched the shorts, but I was still interested that he picked one of them, a gray shirt with blue and green stripes, because, "It has blue in it" and "It matches my shorts." I didn't know he knew a thing about matching clothes...(even lots of grown men don't, after all!). Of course, he then wanted me to chase him to put it on him, which I refused to do!
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