Not Terrible Twos

I may be premature in saying this since she's only 2.25 years old, but in my opinion it's quite fun having a two year old. I think the hardest stage with her thus far was when Ian came home from the hospital. We had LOTS of temper tantrums when she was 17-18 months old as she adjusted to sharing her Mommy and Daddy with a sibling. I am not saying that her behavior is perfect all the time, but is that true at any age? There are times when she is stubborn (like she wouldn't eat peas for Daddy on Wednesday night when he fed her dinner), and there are times when she defies us, but the vast majority of the time she is a delight. Her memory amazes me. For example, a few days ago we were listening to a CD we hadn't listened to recently (and never had listened to that many times), and while one song was playing she came up to me and said "Keep Walking is next." At first I didn't know what she meant and then sure enough the next song started playing and the first words of that song are "Keep walking but you won't knock down our wall" (a VeggieTale song about Jericho). I was amazed, and I have a strong auditory memory! Paul has a strong visual memory (which I definitely do not have). We also discovered recently that she knows the name of the town we live in. She learned that on her own without us trying to teach her that bit of information. It blew me away the first time she told me. She pronounced our three syllable town perfectly. Now I'm trying to teach her that Grandma and PopPop live in Gordon because she thinks they live in our town also. Her vocabulary continues to surprise as at times. For example, this evening when I was busy with Ian Nadia went to Paul and said "Daddy will read to me instead." We didn't know she knew the word "instead."

The slide has a lot of static electricity!

In addition to amazing us, she also makes us smile. I will never ever ever get tired of hearing her say "I wove you." She says it spontaneously quite often these days. Sometimes she says "I wove you too" even if she's the first one to say it, lol. I also will never get tired of hearing her say "bank you, Mommy." About once a day she keeps thanking me for getting her Madame Blueberry. That was a well spent $3 let me tell you. It really pleases me that she is showing gratitude voluntarily more and more.  On Wednesday in the car she said "Larry is my best friend in the whole wide world." I am pretty sure I never considered a cucumber to be my best friend, although as a young child I did like eating them (which isn't true of Nadia).