AND THE EMMY GOES TO . . .: August 2009

Look at this cute little girl, folks... Just a sweet pumpkin enjoying a fudgebar on a warm day, right? On the contrary! Shhhh ... this is a 2 year old trying to take over the world. Take another look at the picture... Emmy wore those sunglasses for 21 hours straight. When she was inside, she kept them on. When the sun sank below the horizon, she kept them on. When she went to sleep, she kept them on. When she woke up during the night, she pushed them up the bridge of her nose, and KEPT. THEM. ON. We kindly suggested on multiple occasions that she could remove them and therefore have improved vision, but no no no, we were messing with her image here. How dare we. Only when Emmy fell off a chair at 10 am the next day (no injuries, of course-- this is not the point of the story, people) did Ryan swiftly remove them and hide them while she was crying her little eyes out. And she hasn't asked about them since.

Now-- there are a couple things this says about our girl, Emmy:

Emmy is BAD ASS. I knew that Emmy was a rough 'n tumble, tough girl before I even knew that I was specifically growing her inside my belly. So it's no surprise to me. But if any of you ever had any doubts, ask yourself this: have you ever worn sunglasses for 21 hours straight? Point proven. Moving on...
Emmy is STUBBORN. She wants what she wants when she wants it just because she wants it. Got it? Does she want something else just as good, or even better? No, because that's not what she wants. Does she want anything that's your idea? No, because you want her to want that and she wants to want what she wants. Emmy is full on into the 2 year old's tantrums now because of this. At first causing great distress in me, especially, we're learning that usually the best thing to do is to leave her alone to scream and cry and thrash around, checking in every so often until it dissipates about 15 minutes later. What usually brings her out of the tantrum is Emmy inching her way over to me, saying, "bubbles," and pointing to her poor leaky nose. So I clean up her nose and move on to the next activity, hoping and praying that the next tantrum might wait until tomorrow to come along.

I've learned that some kids have tantrums and some don't. And apparently the fact that I was a no-tantrum child didn't create enough good karma to give me one of the same. But when I try to think positively about the whole situation (which is close-to-rare occurrence), I realize that I'm probably learning much more about myself and maybe even about Emmy than if she quietly did what she was asked to do all day long. That's got to pay off for both of us in the long run.