It is so lame to claim that every age is your favorite. In my defense there have been a few times in the last 18 months that I admitted were NOT my favorite. But I just love 2. Mostly I love the vocab leaps that happen at 2 right along with the awareness of time and space and all those interesting things. It makes for a lot of changes in a short amount of time.

Here are a few notes I’ve made of new things we are going through:

• The doors. Addison can open them ALL including the exterior doors of our house which means we have to both watch her AND remember to keep them locked. We have a pool directly out our back door. If you think there is even a minute where I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing, you’re wrong.
• Talking about past experiences. This is really fun - I love hearing Addison’s memories! She’ll tell you all about the fun she had with her friend Jackson throwing sand and playing ball with Travis. She’ll tell you how Noah held Laurie’s baby (but not about how SHE held Laurie’s baby!). She’ll tell you all about how she said “hi” to Grandma and Grandpa and played with snow. She spent days randomly asking when she’d have more presents to open after her second birthday. Its cool to have a little window into her memories.
• With this comes a realization about timelines in general. She can look forward to things, like her birthday or a trip. And she can NOT look forward to things like her nap and bedtime. And then there is the new most maligned favorite car phrase, “Almost there? Where we going? Almost there?” I kid you not.
• She relates experiences from tv and movies onto real life. She totally thought the airplane we took to Denver was a rocket ship and she did the Little Einstein “pat pat” on take-off both times. Adorableness. By the end of our trip she learned the word for airplane but is still just as likely to see a plane and call it a rocket ship. Heehee. This also makes tv scary sometimes, though. Her favorite movies are The Land Before Time and Nemo but she watches both of them with her hands on her ears at all the scary parts. Its amazing to me that she has this new concept of fear and anxiety. Even when the movie’s music doesn’t lend to the mood, she reads fear into all kinds of things now.
• The drama. I love her speech right now because its full of all this DRAMA. She’s fond of the word ‘very’ and uses her intonation to make the very most of the word! Her favorites “it very cold”, “it very sharp”, “it very heavy” and my personal favorite “it very yucky” (this one is saved for half of dinner because along with being two comes being selective about what and when she’ll eat).
• Speaking of being picky, she is newly picky about what she wears, when she wears it and what color it is. She has two new identical pairs of pants and has warn the same PINK pair for 3 days straight, flat out refusing to even consider the blue pair. She doesn’t know her colors well yet but boy does she know PINK. I would say thankfully she has little pink in her waredrobe but the reality is that this just means she wants to wear the same few things over and over. Or that she refuses to take off her pajamas (all of which are pink, oddly), EVER. She is also really attached to one hat that she has to wear whenever she thinks of it. Its a cute neutral hat but I’ve tried to expand her hat wardrobe to no avail. She really just loves THIS hat. And she is absolutely obsessed with sunglasses. We know enough to carry them with us at all times becuase she will ALWAYS ask and it isn’t unusual for her to insist on wearing them indoors too. So I apologize in advance for the sunglass photos you will see from now on.
• She’s also obsessed with backpacks or, more dangerously, any long straps, strings or necklaces that she can throw around her neck to act as “backpack” straps. Again with the watching her every second. I am totally freaked she’ll strangle herself but when you have kids up through teens you can’t really child-proof, you have to parent-proof.
• There’s all this ANTICIPATION now in her world. This brings fears. The aforementioned tv fears. But also fears of the water which she nows sees as a threat. It means she’s perpetually angry at all our pets for being ABOUT TO steal her food (even though our cats? not so threatening in reality!). She’s much less willing to share now, although still by far the best sharer of all the kids. If you ask her to share she will think about it for awhile, complete with chin tapping and “hmmmm”ing! Then you have about a 50/50 chance of her agreeing to share.
• Again on speech, she’s routinely speaking in 6 word sentences now and recently picked up the phrase “and then” so will now string together long thoughts. We can understand her about 50% of the time, maybe more. But frequently she will still go off on tangents and we literally do not understand ANY of the words. because pretty much everything out of her mouth is new, there is no history to go on and sometimes no context, since she’s also talking abstractly now too. Today she spent half an hour telling me “something’s missing” about various things in her life: her hair bow (missing: HAIR!), her lego flower (missing: stem), etc. And this one is fun: “I busy!” or “I busy sucking thumby!” or “I busy sitting on Dada”. I have NO idea where she learned about being busy! har har.
• She’s always had a vivid imagination but it has really bloomed of late. The other day she literally spent a half hour straight playing “doggy” and fetching (on hands and knees, with mouth) anything I’d throw across the house. If I told her to sit before throwing (like I do our dog), she would plop over onto her butt and sit patiently. OMG, it cracked me up. Plus there was the hand-licking. That girl takes her games a bit far. She’s also into puppets and little animal figures. She loves to play pretend with them all.
• I don’t know if its her personality or if I’m more aware but Addison always lets us know, through her extreme frustration, when she’s coming up to a major milestone. She would stand and cry while her brothers flew by her on foot for a month prior to taking her first steps. She would stare at her feet and cry out of frustration that they coudln’t jump several months before much obsessive practice yielded those real air-borne jumps (and now jumping, skipping and galloping are her ONLY modes of transportation). Now I see it again with her drawing. She is so focused on making pictures of things and will try and try and ask us to hold her hands and draw FOR her and she will trace what we draw and you can tell she WANTS it. She wants to be able to draw what she sees and she is going to do it over and over and over until she finally gets it.
• Last one. She is totally into building things. Lego things. Block things. Things out of couch pillows. She uses her stacking blocks to built castles over and over and over in many configurations and is just so proud each time she finishes. Its crazy how driven she is to create things out of nothing.

Yeah I totally love this age. Also I know what comes next…..THREE. And three is full of awfulness and angst and drama that can not be matched. So I’m going to soak up every ounce of two that we have and enjoy every second of it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under Milestones, Parenting, Things I Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.