October 2008: Lists, Part 2

Another one of the posts I've found abandoned in draft mode. Orignally written 10/28/08. Piper was 16 months old, starting to talk a lot, and running, jumping and climbing with ease. We had been in our house in Charlotte for about six months.     

Things My Child Likes To Pay With
Broken cellphones
Cats
Cat toys
Kleenex boxes
Entire rolls of oh-so-shreddable toilet paper
My knitting books
Magazines
The horribly pink singing teapot my mom bought her
Bottle caps
Anything she can reach through the child-safety-latched cupboard door and grab
Entire bottles of shampoo
Ink pens
Yard trash
Rocks

 Things My Child Couldn't Care Less About
The $10 all-natural wooden teething ring she liked in the store
The $11 Petey Piranha plush she wouldn't let go of in the store
The $12 Domo plush she wouldn't let us leave the store without
The $30 non-toxic and totally safe Haba Stockpile House she wouldn't leave alone in the store
The gigantic stuffed dinosaur plush she carried around the grocery store for twenty minutes
The other two gigantic stuffed dinosaur plushes we bought because she loved the first one so much and they were on clearance
The gigantic "world's biggest piano mat!" my in-laws bought her last Christmas, which is taking up space in the closet.

Cute Tricky Fun

That is what my kid is these days. She still has her whine-a-thons, but most of the time she's pretty fun to hang out with. She's very, very talkative and the things that come out of her mouth just keep getting funnier as her vocabulary expands. She is an excellent mimic. She repeats things we've said and even has our inflection down pat. Sometimes it's almost creepy how well she can remember and repeat precisely what we've said.

She was splashing in the bath last night and called out in a truly eerie imitation of my voice, "Ryan? Ryan? Hey Ryan? Can you see what's on HBO tonight?" Then she went back to dunking her bathtub toys under the bubbles. From the living room came the sound of my husband laughing his ass off.

She was trying to drink out of a cup with a straw in it, and kept tipping it up so that nothing got to the straw and the drink ran out the top. "Tip it down," we told her. "It's a straw, you have to tip it down." "Tip it doowwwwn?" she repeated, drawing out the word in a pitch-perfect impression of a friend's little boy we had played with months earlier. "Did you tip it down?" She giggled and repeated it over and over, sounding exactly like her little friend each time.

Earlier this week, I didn't feel good so I spent some time vegging out watching, per Piper's request, episode after episode of Doctor Who. Eventually I turned off the tv and dragged my ass off the couch. "I would like to watch another Doctor Who," said Piper. "I would really like it." I told her no, we were done for today and we had to find some fun stuff that didn't involve the tv. She sighed. "Alright," she said, resigned to an evening devoid of the Doctor and Rose Tyler. "Maybe watch Doctor Who tomorrow," she said in a concilatory tone.

I handed her a PB & J for lunch (she only started liking them recently). "A drink would be nice," she commented before taking a bite. "I would like some chocolate milk."

She can drink a LOT of chocolate milk. Even though I cut it with 60% white skim milk, a gallon jug of chocolate milk lasts less than a week. That is a serious amount of liquid to pour into one little girl.

Chocolate milk is not the only sugary thing she sucks down. We tried our best to keep refined sugars out of the house, but my husband's sweet tooth and my weakness for breakfast bread items combined with well-meaning grandparents and friends to introduce our child to a host of corn-syrup vehicles. She loves ice cream and popsicles; I buy the "Mighty Mini" slow-melt pops and she can eat a box of 24 in just three days. It used to be easy to keep her out of them, becuase we'd just say "NO, YOU HAVE HAD 7 POPSICLES IN THREE HOURS YOU ARE NOT GETTING ANY MORE TODAY PLEASE STOP ASKING OR I WILL THROW THE GODDAMNED THINGS IN THE TRASH" and that was the end of it. This happy era came to an end when she learned not only how to open the fridge & freezer doors, but also how to climb the shelves, grab the box off the top shelf, and tear it open to help herself to cold fruity goodness whenever we cut her off. We tied the doors shut with a scarf and she untied it. I tried a belt and she unbuckled it. Pretty much all we can do is yell "Get OUT of the FRIDGE!" every 10 minutes and listen closely for the crinkle of plastic wrappers.

Her problem-solving skills have cranked up a notch in past months, so she has figured out now that when she wants something on the counter, she can get a stockpot out of the cabinet, flip it upside down, and stand on it to reach higher. There used to be a once-inch margin at the edge of our countertops; now the never-ending clutter on top of them keeps getting pushed back farther and farther. She can reach into the kitchen drawers without help, so I find her rummaging for forks, pulling out dishcloths, or getting into the batteries. We've had to have several conversations about Why Sharp Things Are Bad and Things That Should Never Go In Your Mouth.

Ryan has been home more lately, and he's making an extra effort to spend time with her; as a result, they are buddies and I find myself not necessarily the go-to parent in times of crisis. He has even put her to bed several nights this week, which is almost unheard-of. Usually I am the one who has to sit in her darkened room for 20-60 minutes at bedtime, snuggling her and singing and getting drinks of water and finding favorite toys and answering questions and telling her to settle down and lay still and stop fidgeting and quit kicking and would you please for the love of God go to sleep? She still does not sleep through the night, but at least I get an occasional break from the long, drawn-out bedtime wind-down.

"Terrible" Doesn't Quite Cover It

We are slowly feeling better over here, although I still find myself holding Piper down ten times a day to wipe her nose and I keep making spicy things for dinner to make my sinuses feel better. We had to miss a friend's barbecue on Sunday due to this oh-God-when-will-it-END sickness. Piper was feeling a bit better that day and starting to run around like usual, but I decided we should probably stay in quarantine. There were going to be other kids there, and I thought about how pissed I would be if somebody brought their coughing, snot-dripping kid to a party and let them hug all over Piper. I also didn't want to be responsible for giving this plague to anyone else.

Piper's birthday is next week. She will be two years old, and some days I wonder where my sweet little baby went. I wonder that most days, actually, because two is shaping up to be pretty challenging. I feel like all I have done for the past few days is scream at her and put her in time-out. She has stopped listening to and obeying our requests; the threat of a time-out or telling her "NO!" is no longer enough to deter her. She's smarter, taller, and has better dexterity than ever before, so her capacity for destruction is huge. So far this week she has:

- Refused to stay dressed on a daily basis. Every day it takes me until noon to talk/bargain/shove her into clothes, and by the time her nap rolls around in the early afternoon, she is always at least half-naked again. The naked little wild thing running around did come in useful when some bible-thumpers rang the doorbell and wanted to talk about Jesus, though.

- Started climbing into the bathroom sink. Two days ago I heard the bathroom fan running and went to investigate. I found Piper sitting in the bathroom sink, gleefully pumping the hand-soap dispenser and rubbing it all over her (naked, of course) body. She'd already uncapped a tube of toothpaste and squeezed half of it onto the counter, in addition to putting generous amounts of soap on my toothbrush.

- Because she is potty-trained (has been for a couple months, whoo!) I can't lock her out of the bathroom. Despite my warnings to stay out of the sink, the very next day I heard her howling and found her sitting in the sink again, this time with her chin covered in blood. She had climbed up there, taken the razor Ryan keeps in the toothbrush cup, and licked it. She was okay, just a small cut on her tongue, but after that I stuck her potty chair in the hallway and shut the bathroom door.

- Pried open the under-sink cabinet in the kitchen to the full extent allowable by the safety latch and rummaged inside. I caught her trying to drag a bottle of hardcore flea spray through the two-inch gap.

- Used the refrigerator handles to try and climb up the fridge. Used the long, flat box that serves as a door to her room first as a slide and then as a ladder to climb to the top of her 6-foot bookshelf. Climbed up on the couch and jumped off. Climbed everything that is climbable and then some.

She throws her clothes into the bathtub as I'm running water for her bath at night. "Sploosh!" she yells, then giggles as miniature My Little Pony underwear and a striped t-shirt disappear under the bubbles. I tell her to stand up, she sits down and looks at me defiantly. I tell her to sit down and she stands up and runs around. I tell her to stop touching the floor lamp in the living room, and she pushes it over. I give her a waffle and tell her to take small bites, and she crams the whole thing in her mouth. I break it up into bites for her, and she stuffs three pieces in at a go. Yesterday she was jumping around on the couch and took a header. Literally, she fell right on her head. Twice.

If I ask her to be quiet, she talks more and louder. I ask her to be careful of my foot (I think I broke my pinky toe...again), she finds a way to stomp on it every time she comes near me. When we're outside, I tell her to be careful of an anthill and she runs right through it. I tell her to stay out of a mud puddle and she grins at me and jumps into it with both feet.

She buckles herself into her jungle-gym swing and then screams when she can't get out. I unbuckle her and tell her not to buckle it again, but she does anyway, and screams for me to come let her out. We repeat this process 20 times every day. She takes the clothes off her dolls, then asks me to put them back on over and over again. She slams doors and howls because she can't get them open again. She asks me to read the same books 10 times in a row, and when I ask her to pick a different book or say I'll read it again later, she screams "Again! Again! Ag-g-g-g-g-ain!" She asks for something and I tell her no, then she spends the next 15 minutes following me around asking for the same thing over and over, until I get mad and yell and send her to her room.

I try not to get mad at her, but lately I haven't done a very good job of it. We are here, together, just us, in the house, every day. There is nobody else for her to scream at and stomp on the toes of; there is nobody else to make the lunch she refuses to eat. Aside from a trip into the back yard or up and down the sidewalk (where I will spend a lot of time telling her to stop putting rocks in her mouth, stop stomping on ant hills, stay out of other people's yards, and stop sitting in mud puddles), there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. There is nobody else to answer her howls and demands or tell her NO! Stop it! Get out of that! Put that down! every thirty seconds. It's hard to form a complete thought, let alone get anything done. I know it's just her age, I know she's just testing boundaries. But you know what? My boundaries are tested enough these days. I'd just like a little peace and quiet.

19 Months

She is such a little kid. It's in the language explosion of the past two weeks; the first at 15 months resulted in 3-5 new words a day, but this one has her both parroting and composing full sentences, using possessives correctly, and totally cracking us up on a daily basis. It's in the lanky toddler's limbs that dangle from my arms as I lug all 23 lbs. and 33 inches of her to bed at night. She grew two full inches between her 15-month and 18-month checkups. Which explained why one day all her pants were suddenly too short. It's in the way she plays - making a toy horse pretend to gallop and whinny or kiss a dinosaur, instead of just pounding, throwing, or disassembling it - and the way she chooses specific toys for specific things. It's a thousand little things she does (like singing along with the stereo or makng "ahhhhhhhhhh...." noises in the car whenever we go over a vibratey-bumpy road) that show us how fast she is becoming not-a-baby.

She is WAY into monsters right now. Her favorite toy is a plastic dinosaur named Raar. Well, Raar II, technically. Raar I is a huge stuffed Tyrannosaurus with a freakishly big head (one of these) that she loves to drag around and wrestle. "Raar? Raar?" she always said when playing with either of them. "Raar? Monssers!" Monday she told me that Raar II was a dinosaur, not just a monster. For Christmas, we bought her this shirt from Threadless, which she insisted on wearing as soon as she opened it. We put it on right over the monster-print (it looks like this) footie pj's she was wearing (she totally lost her mind over those things when she opened them on Christmas Eve). She refused to take it off, only swapping the pj's for yoga pants later in the day at my repeated request. She slept in the shirt that night. Every time she sees it she insists on wearing it immediately. She turns up the hem to look at the monsters printed on the inside and gets a kick out of them every time. "Monssers? Monssers?"

We ordered this shirt and this one in slightly larger sizes and I stashed them in a closet until her birthday in June. I just hope she's still into monsters then.

She is really, really funny, and really, really frustrating. It's like living with the world's cutest crazy person. One second she's putting plastic teacups on her head and giggling "Hat? Hat, Mommy?" and then she's screaming and throwing the teacups because they won't stay on top of her had. She grabs my head with both hands and comes at me with a truly scary teeth-bared, evil-eyed grimace and I try to pull away because I'm thinking oh shit, she's going to bite my nose off but she says "Kissum?" and gives me a smacker on the lips instead. Sometimes, just to keep me guessing, she actually does bite me on the face. She wanders into her room to play, chattering happily to herself and in thirty seconds she is howling and throwing herself on the floor because she's trying to drag her Rody Horse into the living room and it won't fit through the half-open bedroom door.

She got some shots at her 18-month checkup in December, and we had been blaming that for the recent appearance of Evil Piper, but when the tantrums never ended I got desperate and had to re-read the copy of The Happiest Toddler On the Block that my MIL bought for me. I've had it for over 6 months and couldn't make it very far in because the writing is so irritating. Every third sentence has an exclamation point, and the good Dr. Karp is so busy using his cutsey-wootsey terminology that the information he's trying to convey frequently gets lost. But I did manage to decipher that the Terrible Twos actually start around 18 months and I should expect at least six more months of screaming, mood swings, and tantrums before it starts to even out. Grrreaaaat. Piper seems to be really ahead of the curve with her language and communication skills, and we were hoping this would spare us some of the "Terrible" in the "Two." Apparently not, it just means she can use the correct terminology and sentence structure to tell us what she's pissed-off about.

But, like I said, she cracks us up every day. Let's spend a few minutes with her, shall we?

"Puttin' on socks!" she declares as she takes my mismatched ones out of the laundry basket and puts them on. By the time she's done, she has 3 (all different) socks on her left foot, 2 on her right, and 1 on each hand. Then she wanders the house, wiggling her fingers and giggling "Socks-ocks. Puttin' on socks." Eventually she tires of this and goes to the chair where our orange cat Fritz is sleeping comfortably. "Fritz. Get out," she says, and climbs into the chair to sit on him. "Sittin' in chair. Fwitz. Cats. OUT!" She pushes him out of the chair and he stalks away with his tail twitching. Now that he's out of the chair, it is no longer interesting, so she climbs down and goes to where three other cats are sleeping, piled together in another chair. She bends down near their faces and two of them wake with wide, horrified eyes. "KITTIES!" She yells. The awakened cats scatter. She grabs Beckham, who is still laying there, and hugs him. Around the neck. Very tightly. He squirms. "Kissum?" She lays a kiss on his head. "Beckham! Nose? Kiss." She grips his head and kisses him on the nose. She spies the wall outlet with my laptop cord plugged into it. "No no no," she says as she tries to stick her finger into the other outlet hole. She grabs an empty Starbucks cup from the edge of my desk and brings it to me. "That's Mommy's coffee," she says. "Latte? Sip?" She pretends to drink from the empty cup with a slurping noise. "Mmm, coffee. Good." Then she goes into the kitchen, were she unloads the silverware basket from the dishwasher onto the floor, adds an entire drawer of Tupperware, and when I give her some goldfish crackers, tosses those into the mix as well. "Golfish?" When I ask her what a fish does, she turns to me and grins, then opens and closes her mouth like a lazily circling goldfish in its bowl.

Of course, five minutes after all this funny cuteness, she's laying on the living room floor shrieking because I told her she can't go outside without a jacket on.

Lists:

Stuff She Can Do
- Use "please," "thank you," and "you're welcome" at the appropriate times
- Count to 5
- Sometimes count to 10
- Remember and reference things that happened days or weeks ago
- Put her toys back where they go (takes a LOT of direction from me, but mostly because she likes to pretend she can't near me when I tell her it's time to clean up)
- Recite most of her favorite books from heart
- Sing along to a number of songs, including (but not limited to) "So Sorry" by Feist, "My Winding Wheel" by Ryan Adams, "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Harvey Danger cover of "Oh! You Pretty Things!"
- Repeat any line she hears on tv directly after it is said. I will never be able to watch HBO normally again. Some network shows are even pushing it.
- Repeat the word "bitch" over and over as "biiish" and chortle, then say it again when I tell her "We don't say that, Piper. That is not a word for you to use." I tripped over something in a store last week and muttered, "Oh, son of a..." under my breath. "Bitch," she finished for me, and grinned.
- Use possessives correctly (Mommy's bed, Daddy's milkshake, etc, and even "my dinosaur" or "my blankie")
- Identify herself in pictures. When we look at my Flickr account or the videos on my cell phone, she points and says "Piper, that's you!"
- Sing the alphabet song from T onward. Her favorite part isn't the letters but the "Now I know my ABC's..." bit and sometimes she just starts at W to get to it. We're working on the first half of the song.
- Recognize some words and colors. These are always random, although the colors are getting better. She usually gets blue, green, and pink right, although sometimes she thinks it's funny to tell us everything is blue. The word thing always surprises us because she'll just point to a word and say it, but she doesn't do it every time she sees that word and it's not the same word each time it happens. She really likes for us to point at words and spell them out for her, though.
- Climb out of her crib (this started Wednesday night, and you can guess how thrilled we were).

Things she likes
- Monsters
- Dinosaurs
- Halloween
- Christmas Trees and Lighs
- Milkshakes and Ice Cream
- Chicken
- Bananas
- Bacon (I have never seen a little kid pack away bacon like that)
- Stickers (there are stickers of all kinds stuck to EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE)
- Dogs
- Books about going potty, kittens, monsters, or bears

Things She Is Not So Fond Of
- Going to bed (after a good month or so of 10:00 bedtimes, we are back to the anywhere-between-midnight-and-two routine)
- Vegetables, or anything that looks like it could have been a vegetable in its past life.
- Anything that looks like it might have vegetables in it anywhere, or that potentially sat next to a vegetable in the kitchen. If it even looks like it might be green and good for you, she won't have any of it.
- Eating in general, unless it's bacon (or chicken, if she's in a good enough mood).
- Me getting to read a book or check my email.
- Princess jewels, playing tea party, or any of the other girly crap my mom had on her agenda when she was here.