Why Won't You Stop Asking Me Why?

I hate the word "why." And if you ask me why, I'll probably bite your head off. So please don't ask, let me just tell you. Princess is in the "why" stage. She has been for a while, and at first, I thought it was cute that she wanted to learn so much. Now, she seems to think that no matter what I say, I expect her to follow up with "Why?"
Me: "Princess, you just stepped on your sunglasses and broke them."
Princess: "Why?"
Me: "I don't know why you did that."
Princess: "Why?"
Me: "Because I have no idea why you do most of the things you do."
Princess: "Why?"
Me: "Because 2 year olds are inexplicable."
Princess "Why?"
Me: (Pulls out hair in frustration) "Stop asking me why! I don't know why!!"
Princess: "Why?"
Me: (Screams and locks self in bathroom)
Princess: (Bangs on bathroom door) "Why?"
So yeah...not so cute anymore.

Have you ever noticed that people are never happy with how many children you have or don't have? After the wedding ceremony, people (especially prospective grandmas) sidle up to you at the reception with a glint in their eye and casually ask how long you plan to wait before having kids. Five months later, the same question is posed, but this time with a vague sense of urgency. A year later, people start slipping you brochures with titles like "How to Overcome Infertility" and "Babies: A Fulfilling Experience"

When you finally cave and become pregnant, complete strangers feel as if it's acceptable for them to add their opinion. Questions arise as to the number of babies you are carrying even though you've had two ultrasounds to prove that there really is only one baby in there. Fast forward to when the baby is 6 months old. People start to whisper behind your back. "Do you think she'll have another soon?" It's almost as if, since you've proven your ability to create a new life, they expect you to pop out another one within the year. After you've had your second baby, some people start to change their tack. Instead of pushing you in the direction of pregnancy, they tell you how you now have the perfect pair and don't need any more. Others will still hold out hope that you continue to have more. If you dare to become pregnant again, you will receive advice on how three children is really a difficult number to have because someone is always left out. About half of the people telling you this are trying to make you feel guilty for bringing another life into this world, the other half are telling you to have one more to even things up a bit. When you bring home your fourth baby, with only a few rare exceptions, people will begin giving you literature on the dangers of overpopulation and asking you how you can possibly handle so many little people hanging on you all day long.

Unsolicited Advice:
One of the best things about having kids is that they make great gift ideas. I don't mean you should wrap your 10 month old up and give him away at Christmas time, but pictures of your kids or personalized items with pictures of your kids make great gifts for relatives (your boss at work may not be too impressed with a mug showing off your children's "silly" faces).

Is It Toddlerhood or an Evil Plot to Take Over the World?

A thought struck me tonight as I was scraping a burnt candle wick out of Princess's mouth. Parenthood is strange. Hard, fun, exciting, rewarding, and strange.

I never thought I would see the day when I obsessed over another person's body functions the way I do with Princess. When she was a newborn, Hubby and I carefully noted each and every diaper and its contents. Now that's she's being potty trained, I cheer and reward her with an m&m each time she pees in the toilet and she gets a standing ovation when she poops in the toilet. And honestly, the phrases, "No, Honey. Don't play in your potty." and "Oh no! You dropped your m&m in the toilet! Let me get you another one." were things I never really saw myself saying.

Speaking of weird phrases, there are so many times that I say something to Princess only to find myself realizing how strange I would sound to another person. Some of my favorites so far:
"Princess, stop! Sheep don't go in the garbage!"
"Stop eating that candle."
"Why are there teeth marks in your shoes?"
"Why don't you go give Tigger a hug?"
"We don't lick the carpet, Honey."
"Take that cat food out of your mouth and give it back to the kitty."

I think parenthood is especially strange when you're the parent of a toddler. Princes's moods, likes and dislikes, and behaviors change from moment to moment. A food that she couldn't get enough of yesterday makes her scream in horror at the sight of today. She can be laughing hysterically at me making faces at her and then mid-laugh, will switch to a condescending frown that says, "How dumb do you think I am?" I've given up trying to figure out why Princess does the things she does, things like throwing the baby doll she'd been mothering so gently to the floor and stomping on its head or carrying a empty gatorade bottle around with her for two days straight.

I was at The Farm one evening for supper and Hubby's mother started putting some peas on Princess's high chair tray. I immediately told her not to bother because Princess couldn't stand peas and hadn't eaten them since she was about 6 months old. Before the words had left my mouth, Princess was shoveling the peas in her mouth like she couldn't get enough of them. My mother-in-law told me that when her kids were younger, and they inevitably proved her wrong when she made a statement about them, she would say, "I'm just the mom, what do I know?" How true.

Unsolicited Advice:
When Princess is balking at doing something like cleaning her toys up or giving me a few minutes to do some laundry, I have found that I can make her happy by asking her if she would help me. She's happy and busy for a few minutes and I get my way too!

Happy Birthday and a Half

As of last week, Princcess is 18 months old. To me, that seems like another milestone age. I remember when she was a tiny baby (*sniff*), and toddlers seemed so big and scary to me with the potential to hurt my fragile newborn. I now have one of those destructive, opinionated, energetic toddlers. I'm wondering how I'll react when I have another baby. Will I stop perceiving Princess as my baby and start to see her as the older child whom the baby needs protection from? I guess I'll see when I get there, but for the record, "there" will not arrive until I can convince Hubby about having another one.

One of the best parts of Princess being 18 months old is that, just as the child development books predicted (you know, the ones that have all the wisdom in the world to impart to parents about raising their children and are never wrong), she is retesting all the limits we've set for her and pushing them to new extremes. Along with pushing the limits, she's also happily pushing Mommy into insanity.

Princess has never been allowed near my laptop. I had finally trained her not to climb up on the chair at the computer desk last month. Last week, however, I caught her by the computer once again. This time, she wasn't sitting on the chair pecking away at the keyboard and exlaiming joyously whenever she managed to make the laptop "do" something. Instead, she had used the chair as a springboard for climbing onto the desk. When I found her, she was calmly sitting on the closed laptop testing my ballpoint pens on a paystub I hadn't filed yet to see if the ink was dried up. I firmly reprimanded her and left the room to finish putting last month's clean laundry away. When I returned she greeted me with a cheerful grin from atop the computer once more. After the sixth time of repeating this scenario, I resorted to the same measure I had used to keep her from climbing on the chair over a month ago. I turned the chair over on the floor and resigned myself to guests asking me if I knew my computer chair had tipped over.

On Saturday night, it was agreed that, since Hubby and I both had to work early the next morning, Princess would spend the night at his parent's house just down the road from us. I foolishly decided to feed her supper before taking her down to The Farm for the night. Around 6 o'clock, her usual suppertime, I asked Louise if she would like to eat. She enthusiastically started signing "eat" repeatedly (she knows some sign language) and rushed into the kitchen giggling. I seated her in the high chair and began to fill her blue plastic plate with sweet potatoes and ham (two of her favorite foods). As soon as I turned around to put the plate on the high chair tray, chaos broke out. I could practically see the unspoken words floating above Princess's head. "I didn't order that." I assured her that I was far too underpaid to run a restaurant for her benefit, especially since she is a notoriously bad tipper. A screaming tantrum ensued as she attempted to fling her plate and its contents across the kitchen. I rescued it just before it went airborne and, sensing somehow that my hysterical daughter was not going to eat the food I had so lovingly prepared for her (all it really took was a can opener and a microwave, but that's not the point), covered it with plastic wrap and stashed it in the fridge. I calmly removed Princess from the high chair, which was not an easy task as she was now flailing about wildly and screaming at the top of her lungs. We went out to the living room (one of us willingly, the other not so much) where I placed her on the floor away from anything that could hurt her or that she could hurt. Then, picking up a book, I sat on the couch and "ignored" the massive tantrum taking place several feet away from me. When her screams had finally subsided to pitiful sobs, she got up and came over to me. Giving me a big hug, she pointed hopefully to the kitchen and signed "eat" once again. Triumphant that she had given in so easily (in less than an hour), I took her back to the kitchen and warmed up her plate of food. However, it turned out that she too assumed she'd won the battle. This time, when she started shrieking angrily, I bypassed the living room and dumped her unceremoniously in her crib to wait out the tantrum. When all I could hear from her room were sad sniffles and a tiny heartbreaking voice calling, "Mama, Mama." I retrieved my tear-stained daughter from her crib and gave her a big hug and a kiss before cautiously returning to the battle scene-the kitchen. As it turned out, she still wasn't planning to eat the food I gave her. After an hour of screaming, tears, hugs, kisses, and sudden outbursts, it was finally over. I wiped the last of her tears from her cheeks as I spooned ham and sweet potatoes into her wide open mouth. She had worked up quite an appetite in the last hour and when she had finished her supper, I gave her two whole wheat crackers. She clutched the crackers in her hand and requested that I take her out of her high chair so she could go play while she finished her supper. I refused which lead to more tantrums. This time, she relented in half the time. Hubby arrived home from work as Princess was finishing her crackers (at the table!). Taking in her tear-stained cheeks, red drippy nose, and general look of discontent on Princess's face, he naively asked, "Has she been crying?" Up until that point, I had kept my cool and hadn't lost my temper even when I was removing a thrashing Princess from her high chair for the fifth time. It took Hubby exactly 3.8 seconds to learn how stressful the last hour and a half had been for me and Princess, after which he didn't ask any more questions.

Unsolicited Advice:
It can be extremely difficult to hold your ground and not give in when your child is demanding something. It may be easier to give in and stop the tantrum, but in the long run, it'll pay for you to stand strong. If you give in one time to your child, he or she will continue to test you.

Ketchup Is My New Best Friend

Eating. Should be simple, right? You put the food in your mouth, chew, swallow, and move on. It used to be that way. Until Princess.

First there was breastfeeding. That was an issue right from the start. I'd sit down with her to nurse her and it would end with her just as hungry as before, both of us crying, and milk everywhere.  It wasn't pretty. At first, I pumped with the hospital pump we rented. However, the first weekend after her birth was spent at my in-laws house. I'm naturally a very private person so nursing and pumping had to be done in a room with a door that shut tightly and no admittance to anyone besides my husband. As you know, newborns eat every 27 minutes or so, so I pretty much spent Princess's first months, hidden away from view and isolated from human contact. Anyways, at my in-laws, she absolutely wouldn't nurse, so I would valiantly try, sobbing, for half an hour before passing her off to eager relatives while I pumped her next meal. Wouldn't you know that the pump decided to make its presence known that weekend by squealing so loudly each time the "arm" pulled back that pigs half a mile away answered back. It was a traumatizing experience as I sat in the "good" living room alone with the door closed listening to everybody wonder what that horrible noise was in the next room. I returned the pump on Monday and swore never to pump again. Thankfully, my sister-in-law rescued me by giving me a handy little silicone nipple-like thingamajig that helps babies latch on. If it weren't for that, Princess would've been bottle fed from a week on.

We survived the early days (more like months) of breastfeeding and things were finally starting to go smoothly when we began transitioning to solid foods. Instead of just lifting my shirt and feeding her until she fell off, sated, I now had to figure out what to feed her and how much. I wrote feeding schedules for the first several months of that and passed them on to my sister (who babysits for me while I'm at work), my mother, my mother-in-law, the mailman, and anyone else who came in contact with Princess during a mealtime. Most of them rolled their eyes and tossed the schedule as soon as I was out of sight, but it was so complicated to me, that without the schedule taped to the kitchen table beside Princess's high chair, I was clueless as to what to feed her. Does she get fruit for this meal, or vegetables? Am I making enough cereal? Do I use juice or formula to mix up her cereal at this meal? Yes, I made it more complicated than it needed to be, but that's the way I am. If it's easy, I must be doing it wrong.

Every time I figured out what to feed her and how much, she would either have a growth spurt or be ready to start another type of food. Pureed meats took me a whole week and a half to figure out.

Fast forward to present day toddlerhood. Once I finally got her feeding herself solid foods, I thought I had it pretty easy. Yeah, right. She ate well for a few months, just to lull me into a sense of complacency. I didn't anticipate the way toddlers refuse to eat more than a breadcrumb one day and then gobble down the whole family dinner the next day. Or the way Princess couldn't get enough of sweet peas and ham yesterday, but tries to climb out of her high chair to escape eating the same thing today. I'm a waste not, want not kind of person, but since Princess started eating solid foods, I've thrown out enough food to fill my bathtub...twice. Since Princess is off-the-charts tiny, her pediatrician keeps telling me that I HAVE to get her to eat. I'm seriously considering dropping her off at the pediatrician's doorstep and saying, "Have fun." before leaving to eat a meal where no food is airborne, and no one leaves the table wearing most of their dinner in their hair.

Enter ketchup, my new hero. I remember chuckling at my 2 year old nephew a few years ago when he wouldn't eat anything without ketchup. I never thought that one day, I too would be relying on ketchup to convince my toddler to eat. Out of desperation one day, I squirted some ketchup on Princess's plate and showed her how to dip her food in it. To my surprise and slight dismay, it worked. It worked the next day and the next day and the next. However, her favorite way to eat it is like pudding, dipped up by the spoonful and headed straight for her mouth without the traditional carrier food. So, at a typical meal, she's eating it with her toddler spoon and in between bites, I'm shoveling as many carrots as I can into her mouth before she realizes she's eating them. I tried squirting the ketchup all over her food, but she will only accept it as long as it's in a mountainous mass not touching any of the food on her plate. The magic words to convince Princess to take a bite of food in my house are not, "Open up, please!" or "No dessert if you don't eat your vegetables." or "Eat your food or Mommy's going to have a coronary." Nope. The magic words are, "Look! There's ketchup on your cereal!" So to keep the peace for now, I'm going to keep telling myself that ketchup is made of tomatoes and therefore counts as a vegetable.

Unsolicited Advice:
Use a kitchen dish towel and a bag clip as a bib. It's bigger than the bibs sold in stores (which means more of your kid's clothes will be saved) and is completely washable.