Life With a Toddler - It Ain't All Fun and Games

Most of our days may appear to be nice and serene and sweet, like this above photo. But life with a toddler can be like living with a tiny little hurricane just waiting to happen. For example, mere seconds after taking this photo Ron and I had to basically wrestle Ollie off of his cousin because he wanted to climb up the stairs and she was in his way. He was incessantly screaming "two! two! two!" because that is what he says when climbing things (for a while I was counting the stairs, steps etc while climbing, it's really cute most of the time). As quickly as it began, it is over. 0 to 60 and 60 to.... "Oh, THAT toy is interesting". I will happily give up the obsession and persistent nature of a toddler any day.

Honestly, I have great fun with Oliver. He is vibrant and vivacious and all of the positive fun adjectives you can imagine. It's just a very intense and challenging time to parent a toddler. Even someone with the best patience can break and I work really hard to keep it together for him (and me). Although, sometimes I have to break out my firm words, boundary setting, and redirection and it usually works well, he gets the point that Mama is serious. My sister also taught Ollie how to take deep breaths - and he's caught onto it quite well (and it's pretty adorable). I find it to be a tool of distraction from the fit or obsession/frusteration item of the moment. The following photos contain the fun and interesting adventure of exploring corn starch and water aka goop for the first time. He actually took a little while to get covered in goop he was very delicate and perplexed at first.

He painted his belly with it.

And smiled and said "Cheese!" for the camera. Then it was bath time.