I Heart My 2 1/2 Year Old Nephew
He’s pint sized, he’s clever, he’s learning to speak…This little bundle of terror and imagination is my nephew, who is currently experiencing being “Terrible Two”.
They don’t call being two years old “terrible” without good reason. He’s got good questions about stuff (particularly about the vacuum cleaner), he just doesn’t know how to phrase them. Nor does he have the necessary vocabulary to fully understand an adult’s explanation of the question’s answer. How frustrating, poor guy! And how frustrating to teach him seemingly simple, and yet infinitely complex things like how to take your own t-shirt off, or how to pull your socks off when you haven’t yet developed cognitive memory to push or pull things automatically. (That’s right, that’s the thing that fails you when you push a door clearly marked “Pull”.)
The best thing I’ve found is to turn everything into a game. Won’t get into his pyjamas at bed time? Bring a camera and let him take pictures of the whole process. Won’t keep a “quiet voice” when Daddy is recording in his studio? Take him to the supermarket, point at stuff on the shelves and ask, “Hey, what is this?”. On this occasion, we even made a memory game out of the mayonnaise. He busied himself moving all the jars out of order in the split second I wasn’t looking. So I explained, “No, see, the blue jar lids go with the blue ones, the red with the red.” And hey presto, the shelves were back to displaying normalcy in mere minutes. Phew.
The answer to nearly every item questioned was of course “juice”, his new favorite word following the fad of the word “dip” (as in, “What would you like to eat?” being answered, “I wannnn…DIP!” for breakfast, lunch and dinner), this kid is amazing. And fun. Stay tuned for more tales of being “terrible” at the age of two, and more I Heart (lovely things).
Tags: babysitting advice, family advice, terrible two, toddler, two year olds