Alex at 22 months, part II: Everything else.

[rivka]

Parents commonly joke that "The trouble with child psychology books is that my kid hasn't read any of them." But Alex? Has so obviously read all about the psychology of the two-year-old, and committed it all to heart.

Item one: I am helping her put on her coat. "Alex do the zipper!" She tries for two seconds and can't get the zipper started. "Mama do it!" I reach in. "Alex do it! Mama do it! Alex do it! Mama do it!" Meltdown.

Item two: In the middle of playing, Alex suddenly decides to crawl into my lap. "Mama hold Baby Alex. Mama sing a lullabye. Mama rock you." Less than two minutes later, she's insisting, "No, Mama, Alex go up stairs by self."

Item three: She has been eating her dinner by stabbing bites of food with toothpicks (which she calls "chopsticks"), and has just deliberately broken one too many of them. "Alex like another chopstick!" she demands. I know from experience that just telling her "no" will cause a tantrum, so instead I say, "You can either eat with your fingers, or with your fork." "Fork!" she decides happily, and goes on eating.

Being two is all about simultaneously craving and fearing independence. She wants to forge her own way in the world, be the master of her own fate. And yet she's not at all sure that she's ready to stop being Mama's baby. In the midst of all of these constant demands that we do things her way, she has also started referring to herself as "Baby Alex" - even sometimes asking me to feed her a sippy cup of milk as if it's a bottle. She wants to stand on a chair in the kitchen and help me cook - even argues with me about whether she can have a knife. Then she wants to look through an album of her baby pictures and talk at length about how "Mama take care of Baby Alex."

If we tell her to do something - or especially, not to do something - odds are that she'll object on principle alone. We're starting to learn our way around that. Choices (which I always viewed skeptically) work just as well as the parenting bookssuggest. Another thing that works: instead of a prohibition, using a positive request to do something else. For example, instead of telling her to "stay out of the kitchen" while we're unloading groceries, we give her empty grocery bags one by one, with instructions about which distant place each one should be delivered to. She happily runs back and forth "helping," instead of having the tantrum that would inevitably be sparked by just ordering her away or physically removing her.

What occupies her, at 22 months? Trains, trucks, construction equipment, fire engines, and other things that go. Her large collection of small person and animal figurines, especially the Sesame Street characters. Books, endlessly and always. Singing. Reciting nursery rhymes again and again, especially the ones with hand motions. Crayons. The alphabet. She loves to point out letters everywhere she sees them - we play "Letter Searchers" in the grocery store, for example, and on the street - and asks me to write letters for her every time she sees me with a pen. She can recognize a handful of words by sight: Mama, Papa, Alex, Zoe. She's very intent at picking letters out of her books - I wonder whether she might actually start reading before three, as Michael's father claims that he did.

She loves participating in grownup activities. She's so happy to sweep with the whisk broom, sprinkle grated cheese on the chicken parmesan, stir the brownie batter. She likes to sit, or better yet stand, on a grownup chair. She loves experimenting with different kinds of movement: marching, tiptoeing, walking backwards, sliding, doing a split, spinning around, climbing, dancing. She loves wild physical play - being tipped backward from my lap into a handstand that finishes with a backflip, or being picked up bodily and flung onto the bed.

At the Science Center, she is drawn to the dinosaur section's reproduction of a dig site. They've got a fossil model buried in a rock-hard mixture of sand and wax, and the kids can "excavate it" with plastic scrapers and paintbrushes. (According to the docent, it takes about nine months for the skeleton to be fully excavated. Then they bury it again.) Alex loves to work away at it, trotting back and forth to try all the different tools. She gets deeply engaged in the water table, too, experimenting with pouring, spraying, scooping, filling, mixing. The last time I took her there, she did focused work at the water table for nearly half an hour - until she suddenly burst into tears, and, going over to comfort her, I found that her hands and arms were cold to the touch from the extended submersion.

Her imagination is flowering. The other night, while Michael and I were sitting at the dining room table, Alex tiptoed by us. "Tiptoe, tiptoe." Then, suddenly, she started scratching under her arms in the universal human-pretending-to-be-a-monkey gesture. "Monkey tiptoeing!" she announced. "Ooh ah!" Her word for this is "believe" ("Alex believe a monkey!"), apparently for "make believe." (Why not "pretend," which is what we usually say? No idea.)

Mama/baby interactions loom large in her imagination. Two of anything - say, a half-gallon carton of milk and a half-pint carton of cream - will be identified as a Mama and a baby. A Mama leaf and a baby leaf. A Mama pretzel and a baby pretzel. The Mamas and babies so identified play out a repetitive script: she separates them, they search for each other, they find each other and cuddle. "Where's my baby?" the Mama pretzel calls. "Here's my baby!" "Mama leaf hug the baby leaf." Occasionally, for variety, the Mama will feed the baby or take care of the baby, but mostly it's endless separations and reunions with hugging.

Perhaps because of all the pretend-play practice, she's gotten much more comfortable with being separated from us. She stays at the church nursery with hardly a murmur. She rarely cries when I leave for work - I just get a cheerful "Bye, Mama! See you later!" or perhaps an encomium: "Mama go to work. Mama work hard." A few months ago, the idea of changing childcare providers seemed catastrophic. Now, I think Alex will handle it reasonably well. She's still somewhat shy with new people - for example, you really have to know her for a while to understand how well she can talk. Mere acquaintances are more likely to get a shy smile (or, at most, a word or two) while she buries her head in a parent's shoulder, than a lengthy disquisition on Mamas and babies. Even wcg often finds that it takes her a half-hour or so to warm up to him - although she might have been jumping around saying "Uncle Bill, Uncle Bill!" just before his arrival.

Even with the new autonomy-related challenges, I'm still having a lot of fun mothering a toddler. It's so cool to watch her personhood unfold, and to begin to get a glimpse of her interior life. She amazes and delights me. We're very lucky.

Comments

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

Toddlerhood is awesome.

I also love your observations - I think your background and training help you notice things that most parents wouldn't, so you paint a very different and fascinating picture. Plus, Alex is more interesting than most kids. :)

But reading your observations helps me notice things about Eddie, so this is educational for me, too.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The "helping" in the kitchen can soon mutate into actually genuinely helping. The first thing Z ever did that actually helped was breaking up mushrooms -- I'd wiped the mushrooms, wiped his hands, wiped the table of his high chairc and given them to him as he sat there watching me chop the onions, saying "Break them into pieces". He sat there saying "Break, break, mushrooms, break, Z break mushrooms," and when I wanted them they were all broken up in a perfectly reasonable way ready to put in the lasagne, which otherwise I would have had to have done myself.

(He doesn't believe this now, because he doesn't like mushrooms.)

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I know from experience that just telling her "no" will cause a tantrum, so instead I say...

I know I've read this before, but thank you for the reminder, we're needing this right now. :-)

These are fascinating to read. Every time I try to sit down and write something like this about Henry, I can't remember all of the details. Do you take notes?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Toddlerhood is when I really start seeing children as individual little people. (Intellectually I know it happens before then, but as a non-parent I tend not to encounter it so much.)

I find it fascinating how much of a person's personality really starts to shine through at that stage.

[malibrarian.livejournal.com]

Sarah comments that Alex looks like a 4 in this picture and that she's getting really big.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

Beautiful photos. I love your observations of Alex's achievements.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Being picked up bodily and thrown on the bed was one of Agent Weasel's very favourite things at that age. It was known as a "dwarf toss".

(I had originally remembered it as "flying monkey", but that was when the parents would take her hands, one each side, and "fly" her down a flight of stairs.)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's a fun age.

B