Surprise, Mom! I'm TWO!

I don’t know how it happened. One night this week we unknowingly put our lovely, innocent boy down to sleep and somehow, sometime overnight he turned into a two year old. No warning. No chance to say goodbye to our beloved 20 month old or our previous life of manageable-chaos. Just the sudden unexpected “SURPRISE” we woke up to that day: our child had turned two.

He’s not set to turn two for another 21/2 months, but for some reason the sudden irrational, unprovoked temper tantrums have started early.

I’ve never really appreciated what hard work goes into being a temper tantruming toddler before. It’s pretty exhausting to have to suddenly stop what you’re doing so you can lapse into hysterical-sobbing-limb-thrashing-screaming-that-makes-you-cough-to-the-point-of-near-vomitting. And to have to DO that OVER and OVER again. Sometimes I just think, “SERIOUSLY, Toby why don’t you just finish your meal FIRST before starting this again so mommy DOESN’T have to wipe you and the floor and the walls down again?”

And then there’s the issue of finding an appropriate “inciting incident”. When you’re two and have a set of parents who love, feed, clean and entertain you, it takes a fair bit of creativity to find things to be angry about. But my child seems to have a knack for creativity. It may not jump out at those of you who have passed this stage in your life, but if you think hard about it, being offered cheerios on your way home from day care when CLEARLY you were thinking you’d rather have a peanut butter sandwich, is a good thing to get upset about. And then when those lame old cheerios are taken away from you after you attempted to throw them back at your mother in disgust, it’s another good thing to get angry at. Because maybe you DID want them after all. And the fact that it took your cheerio-pushing-mother all of 2 seconds to figure that out is even MORE irritating. And by this time, you probably already have snot running down your nose, which become messy when you are snorting and sobbing and shaking your head and waving your arms about.

And DON’T get me started on having your NOSE wiped when you’re busy trying to maneuver the cheerios into your (see above description) mouth without getting them covered in snot.

And that was just the FIRST melt down on the 10-minute drive home from daycare.

The great thing about early onset temper tantrums is that he hasn’t yet lost his I’m-still-not-quite-two-yet distractibility. All is soon forgotten if cows, trucks or Layla is mentioned. So maybe we still have a few good months ahead of us. As many very helpful people have kindly pointed out, “just wait till he hits THREE!”

Can’t wait.