What a dazzling new talent this is! Shall I tell you something which will mortify my daughter in the future? Ok, I will and not just because it may alleviate some of the vengeful feelings I’ve been having towards her recently.
My 2-year old daughter is at a stage in her life when she likes to strip off all her clothes- usually when I have just dressed her in something really cute and then come and crawl around under my desk, and throw books on the floor, and investigate my expensive hand cream (yes it smells good enough to eat but that doesn’t mean that she should) which are all distracting enough. But she also likes to climb into my lap and twist my head so that I am forced to gaze into her eyes from a distance of about an inch. We are nose to nose. Sometimes she just looks back at me, her eyelashes tangling in my own much shorter ones, as if I am the most amazing thing she has ever seen, and sometimes if she is feeling especially happy she will kiss me on the mouth over and over again, or play shmootzies which is our word for rubbing noses. And if she is feeling particularly center of the world-ish then she does the head twist (amazing what strength there is in those little arms) and the arm grab. That would be my head and my arms. I can move my chair back from the computer a few feet, type with one-hand painfully extended and still she will reach out and lock her dainty fingers around my wrist and pull until I am as firmly restrained as I would be if an octopus had decided that I was his mate. Sometimes she vaults from the dresser onto my back and clings there like a monkey with a firm grip on my throat. At this point in the procedure I put her on the floor and I try and ignore the wails but it ain’t easy. Right now in fact she has grabbed my arm and crawled into my lap, has removed the hand cream from the table and is pressing her face into mine. I am typing this with my index finger mostly. She also just spilled the dregs of my coffee on the rug but it smells quite nice actually.
She has been picking up scads of words and phrases every day and adding them to a vocabulary that used to consist of ‘No’ ‘Milk’ ‘Juice’ and ‘No’. There’s been ‘thank you’ ‘please’- which I’m not sure she is using correctly- ‘elephant’ ‘ambulance’ ‘flower’ and ‘cereal’ so I’m thinking that we’re having a developmental leap plus a clingy phase right now. I can only hope that it is a phase and a short-lived one (perhaps lunar) because otherwise I don’t think I’ll survive it.
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