This totally describes my girl these days. 

Recently we realized, sort of in shock, that Addy has NEVER had a tantrum. Not one. Now that may all change in the near future but since I started my journey into parenthood with a child who threw multiple tantrums every single day, having a child who throwns none seems odd, at best. She’s just very rational and logical and her comprehension is high so we explain things and that’s good enough. Sometimes she does feel sad, and sometimes she cries into our arms. Hardly a tantrum, just sad. She talks about her emotions openly and clearly and “mad” has just never been in her vocabulary. 

I’ve started to realize that she is looking very carefully into her normal actions and reactions at ways she can master them to meet some higher goal. For instance, when we drove around looking for lights, she would frequently scream at us to stop the car so she could see a certain display better. Of course we obliged. And then those wheels in her head turned and she’d have us stop more and more frequently but not to look at lights – just to do things like “check her cell phone”.  Mmhmm. So while she’s been telling us when she feels she is about to cry for awhile now, only recently has she honed this power for evil. Now whenever we say no to ANYTHING she will break out in her mock quivering sad voice with “blinking back the tears” eyes and announce that she will cry if we don’t bow to her whims. It’s hysterical (and never works, don’t worry!) but she doens’t give up trying! She has become such a total diva that she will announce she is about to cry if we don’t walk over from the other side of the house to pick up a toy she dropped RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER. I mean we are talking SEROIUS diva attempts. I guess you can’t fault a girl for trying. Here she is pulling The Distraught Diva because I would not walk 10 feet away and get her our brown couch blanket:

Also she’s vicious lately and we can’t quite nip it in the butt. She will just haul off and smack anyone (only her parents or siblings, though) for any reason (or no reason…although NEVER out of anger – just out of pure joy!!). Sometimes she’ll go nutso on someone with her fists flying and they just sort of laugh at her because she’s so dainty that you can hardly feel her touching you! She doesn’t seem to be in it for the pain response, she just thinks its fun. But sometimes she uses, ahem, tools. And then it’s bad. Tools like drum sticks, a ruler, whatever. Hopefully we’ll get that business under control tout suite because it’s not fun. The hard part is finding the angle that works best with her. Taking away the offending object works, obviously, to immediately stop the behavior. But she doesn’t mind giving up the object willingly, although she has started promising to be gentle. I’m going to assume, like almost all things parenting, that it’s a phase she will grow out of pretty much regardless of how we handle it. Until then, I need to teach the kids to look out for her winding up for the hit and preempt her strikes and just keep doing what I’m doing, otherwise. We are actually doing the somewhat counter-intuitive maneuver of trying to NOT give the action too much attention since I’m FAIRLY certain that is her driving force here. I did catch one of these scenes on video the other day but it’s on the camcorder and I have no idea how to get it off. It wasn’t funny at the time but it is funny now in retrospect.

Speaking of The Distraught Diva, she can be such a Bratty McBratterton sometimes and it just astounds me. It’s usually hysterical and hard not to laugh. As you’ll see in this video, we totally fail in the laughter department. No one REALLY puts up with it but she likes to think she’s in charge. She can be so sweet when out of nowhere – bam – she hits you with her Naughty Stick (this time just figuratively):

But the vast VAST majority of the time she is sweet, creative, imaginative, hilarious and lovingly gentle. She is absolutely in love with our pets, particularly our dog and my cat Anna who tolerates her affection and attempts to pick her up and carry her. She frequently throws both arms around Lilos big Golden Retriever neck and lets Lilo lick her all over her face. When we went out driving to see lights a few nights ago we took Lilo and she sat next to Addy and Addy just lovingly scratched her head most of the time we were in the car. She always tells them she loves them sooooo much. And she’s equally sweet to us humans, too. She’s very VERY sensitive to my moods and is very empathetic. She can play for hours, sweetly, with Noah and will do anything Dalton & Teegan tell her to do. She’s such a love-bug. 

And a super-silly girl:

(she does this Abajo thing all Pavlovian – no matter where she hears anyone say Ariba in ANY context she busts out the Abajo):

And busts out her own signature dance moves :

Plus also she is a girl who apparently LOVES her microphone and is Queen of the Make-Up-The-Words-As-You-Go singers

And if you can’t stand it and need more Obnoxious Addy Goodness, she had sooo much fun karaoke’ing last night, and even busted out the Human Beat Box at the end (and check out the “is this thing on” microphone move she does periodically):

and finally I missed videotaping the best of this but when she realized she could *travel* with the microphone, we were all blessed with her dance moves while she “sung” and then she went around and crooned to each of us individually:

I love this girl so much, even in her naughty moments. But one thing is for sure – we will never be able to REALLY karaoke again!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Milestones, Parenting, Photos & Videos, 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.