today, bebe marie is 23 months old. this is the last "months" post i'll write, i think -- next month, she'll be two (!!!!!) and after that, well, "25 months" just sounds silly. i'll try to keep updating the monthly bebe with pictures, though.
at 23 months, bebe continues to be the same loving, willful, happy kid she's been since her personality first started to emerge. toddlerhood has brought with it some challenges, to be sure, but she regularly amazes me with her ability to reason and be reasoned with. i'd say that 3 times out of 5, a meltdown is averted because we work together and come up with a compromise. 1 time out of 5 i have to force something on her (getting buckled into the car seat, a poopy diaper change) and 1 time out of 5 i give in to her demands (no bib for dinner? fine, no big deal).
her language continues to develop every day and she now regularly strings long sentences together. she is counting, mostly, to ten, though she has yet to grasp the concept of assigning a single number to a single concrete object once there are more than two of them. the biggest change over the past month has probably been her ability to express her feelings verbally.
some examples:
one night, during a rough stretch when she was fighting bedtime and nothing worked but giving her some time to cry in her crib, she kept calling for me and when i didn't come, wailed "bebe no happy! bebe no happy!"
when morrie pushed her one day at the playground, after she was done crying she told me, "bebe feel sad."
over the weekend, as we prepared to go grocery shopping, she told me she wanted to bring her doll stroller with her. reflexively, i said no, because the thought of having to direct her through the grocery store with her stroller sounded like a pain in the butt. but she kept asking, and eventually i told her that it was ok to bring it as long as she was going to listen to mommy, stay close to me, and stop when i asked her to stop. "that make bebe feel good," she told me.
and you know what? it made me feel good to be the kind of mom who listens to my kid, respects her as a full person with her own desires, and accommodates them when it's reasonable to do so.
at 23 months, bebe continues to be the same loving, willful, happy kid she's been since her personality first started to emerge. toddlerhood has brought with it some challenges, to be sure, but she regularly amazes me with her ability to reason and be reasoned with. i'd say that 3 times out of 5, a meltdown is averted because we work together and come up with a compromise. 1 time out of 5 i have to force something on her (getting buckled into the car seat, a poopy diaper change) and 1 time out of 5 i give in to her demands (no bib for dinner? fine, no big deal).
her language continues to develop every day and she now regularly strings long sentences together. she is counting, mostly, to ten, though she has yet to grasp the concept of assigning a single number to a single concrete object once there are more than two of them. the biggest change over the past month has probably been her ability to express her feelings verbally.
some examples:
one night, during a rough stretch when she was fighting bedtime and nothing worked but giving her some time to cry in her crib, she kept calling for me and when i didn't come, wailed "bebe no happy! bebe no happy!"
when morrie pushed her one day at the playground, after she was done crying she told me, "bebe feel sad."
over the weekend, as we prepared to go grocery shopping, she told me she wanted to bring her doll stroller with her. reflexively, i said no, because the thought of having to direct her through the grocery store with her stroller sounded like a pain in the butt. but she kept asking, and eventually i told her that it was ok to bring it as long as she was going to listen to mommy, stay close to me, and stop when i asked her to stop. "that make bebe feel good," she told me.
and you know what? it made me feel good to be the kind of mom who listens to my kid, respects her as a full person with her own desires, and accommodates them when it's reasonable to do so.
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