Butterflies & Cow Pies

I was telling a friend the other day that parenting an almost-three-year-old is a bit like traipsing through a summer meadow--gorgeous blooms and butterflies all around, but every once in a while you step squarely into a cow pie.

Rudy is, to put it mildly, "asserting his independence" more and more these days, and the process feels like it's all peaks and valleys, with no plateau in sight. Example: one minute he is picking flowers for me in the back yard or sharing "hide and seek" muffins (that he and Megan made together--they had strawberries hiding inside!) with the little girl next door, and the next he is dumping over half a bottle of olive oil and throwing his dinner plate to the ground. Again. One minute stroking his sister's head or making her giggle with his goofy faces, the next shrieking at the top of his voice on the stairs when he knows she's sleeping or bopping her over the head with the butterfly pillow.

It's frustrating and often infuriating, but the thing that keeps us from losing our marbles completely is that we know all of this is normal. The trouble is that he's so ridiculously verbal and articulate that we often forget he's not even three yet. So we find ourselves reminding each other to stop, breathe and re-group often. The worst thing to do--and try as we might, we still fall into this trap at least once every day--is to fuel his tantrum with a dramatic response. Best to stay matter of fact and firm. A colleague of mine said the other day about teaching undergraduates, "We all know that endless pedagogical repetition is the only thing that works," and it occurs to me that the same is true for this developmental moment in Rudy's life. Toddlers crave limits and structure, so we're doing our best to give that to him.

But boy are we tired. Very tired. Super-dooper tired. It's a good thing he's this cute or we'd sell him on the Black Market for sure.