Life with a toddler spins you into a different time flow-- you finish breakfast, get the kitchen tidied, get her changed and dressed, get yourself changed and dressed (if you're lucky)... and it's lunch time. But the day leading up to that point is so full of wonder and giggles it hardly matters that you can't figure out what happened to the last 4 hours of your life.
Actually-- scratch that. Because it's not just the busyness of the day; it's the foreignness of visiting their world. Learning their customs... attempting to speak their language... understanding their ways and introducing them to ours. It's an anthropological expedition.
"Oh! Mamie! Oh no. What-- happint-- Mamie's pants?-- big mess dere..." was Sunday's concerned greeting. I explained I was wearing my painting pants; they were supposed to have paint on them. She seemed to accept that, but at infrequent intervals throughout the day I'd hear her mutter quiet reassurances to herself ("Dat-- mess-- okay... Mamie's painteen pants...that-- s'pose be... paint dere.") so I suspect she's still unsettled by them. She did, however, rally enough to point at one blop of paint and declare it a moose. "A moose.... in a bubble baff."
Everything mundane and drab turns magic and sparkly in the eyes of a toddler.
We have our hair-pulling-out moments too-- like when she refuses to eat her cottage cheese, sulkily declaring it 'too spicy!' Or yesterday, when our blood sugar crashed at the same time and we ate our tuna fish together in tears, both of us missing her mom fiercely.
But meltdowns are rare; overall she's a happy little thing, as long as we spend lot and lots of time outside. She's way easier than Miss G was at that age-- far less bossy and headstrong only intermittently.
And every minute is just so--- ohh, holy crap, I just realized I've been sitting here typing when I could have taken a shower.
