Miss Mischievous

Oh, this grin. Elisa can hide so many wild ideas and emotions with such a simple look. Something about this two and half mark has made her expressions more dramatic and captivating. Which is good because the down side of her quirky little gestures and strutting dances is her temper and absolute willfulness to do what she likes. In the past week, we've found her climbing up and standing on the dining room table, as well as stomping on my laptop. Not highlights, and not typical Elisa behavior. But something must be up, because a recent discussion in my mom's group has been talking about the very same. It's like these kids have all hit a patch where they are doing more to test us and bargain with their newfound verbal skills. Elisa will try to solicit candy at 9 a.m. (a byproduct of all the holiday goodies?) and when I suggest actually eating breakfast, there is so much moaning and fake crying it's beyond annoying. And it's only 9 a.m. Also, she's been reverting a lot to "baby" behavior such as laying in my lap and letting me rock her while she pretends to fall asleep and stealing bottle nipples and the squishy sippy cup spouts and running around with them in her mouth telling me she's a "baby." Generally, I try to keep a sense of perspective with this stuff. Unless she's doing something like the table dancing or smashing my laptop, I will try to get her to play along and correct her behavior. But that said, many, many times Elisa quickly devolves into a puddle of wailing and flailing that cannot be ignored or cajoled into submission. We use her crib as a safe place for timeouts because she often is so hysterical when she gets worked up that she needs all four sides of it to contain her. The craziness can last for minutes at a time, but I try to keep talking to her very softly and keep reinforcing that we can't do "x" behavior so she needs to calm down and say sorry. Most of the time that seems to get through at the end of the 2-3 minutes. We've also been practicing deep breaths which seem to help her when she finally starts to mellow out. It's like watching her hyperventilate and suddenly come up for air. So little by little, we are coming up with strategies for dealing with the terrible twos. Now if the threes are still like this, God help me.