Letter to a 30 Month Old Yes You Can Man

My darling Tricky

 This month you have managed to get quite an impressive handle on politely passive negatives (inherited from your mother I would guess)…

I don’t pink so…instead of: No. 

Let’s see how we go…instead of: Not Now

Mine don’t need it…instead of: actually I don’t want to do it at all, not one bit.

 Rather more worrying is another phrase you picked up this month, much worse than Daddy Is A Plonker and far less amusing. I don’t know where you first learned I can’t but it’s appearing quite frequently, delivered in a sort of frustrated whine, es

pecially when attempting to do something vaguely challenging like threading buttons or pushing playdough through the noodle extruder.  Yes you can, I chant back like some deranged Bob the Builder worshipper, and I help your little fingers to thread the button or extrude the noodles. I try to respond quickly to this because your next action is usually to fling to the floor whatever it is you can’t do. Yet another genetic trait inherited from your father along with hobbit feet and cheeky grins.

Most of all, we hear it in the bathroom because January has not only been the month of Ridiculous Heat it has also been the month of Big Boy Underpants.

Yes, for the record, toilet training has properly begun, with lots of urgent calls of  Mumma Wee Wee! interrupting  a game of trains or cars and ending, mostly, quite happily. The potty has been reinstated as an alternative to the toilet, the garden and the shower (when in tearing hurry). You are the king of Number Ones but so far Number Twos have whipped your butt so to speak, hence your polite refusals to perform on the toilet I can’t, no, no pank you, mine don’t need to do poos…

How it makes me chuckle to think back to a conversation I had last year with another mother of a toddler, where I told her I thought we would “get the toilet training done in the week before Christmas.” Haw Haw. Your mother is a prat.

This morning you started daycare again after several weeks of being with either Mummy or Daddy or some other close family member like Aphwa or Aunty N. And so perhaps it should not have come as such a surprise when, after dawdling over your Weet-bix, you said rather nonchalantly: Mine don’t need to go to daycare today.

Yes, we said, smiling at each other, but we need you to go.

Mine don’t need to go to daycare, you said again, a little louder this time in case we’d failed to understand and then in a cheerful tone: where we go today Mumma? Mooseum?

We go to daycare today, I told you but there were no mor

e smiles. We buckled on your new sandals, we packed a spare pair of big boy undies and we bundled you and the two youngest Naughty Nephews into the car.

Off we go, we chirped in that maddening We Grown Ups Always Know Best tone as you frowned and tugged at your hair and refused to sing the National Anthem with me. (Have discovered it to be excellent lullaby and quite successful in sending you off to sleepy bobos.) And then, once at daycare, the waterworks began in earnest, the pouting lips and the angry screwed up eyes and buckets of tears cascading down from your cheeks and onto mine.  Your carer very sensibly took you by the hand and sent us packing, although I do admit to hovering outside the gate and peering through the slats of the fence to make sure you were ok. The tears had gone before we managed to close the gate but to be fair that gate has a very fiddly latching mechanism that takes all of …oh…ten seconds to complete.

January has seen you swimming at the beach with your Dadda, often beyond the waves much to your mother’s discomfort, suspended on your Noodle (not the play dough variety.) You kickaboo your legs and do your paddle hands and push the water away and you could do that all day, so much do you love the water and your dada and the sensation of floating self propulsion. You never say I can’t in the water. Although you do protest It’s Cold at times.

 You say: lie on my tummy Mumma and you giggle to yourself as I nod and yawn and say: ooh I’m so tired, is there a nice soft pillow somewhere? I position myself on your tummy and start to snore very loudly but before I can do the raspberry exhalation you laugh and squirm and bat at my head and then we laugh together for a while until I slyly manage to sneak the raspberry onto a bare patch of soft brown skin.

We go to the supermarket and you sit in the trolley with sultana bribes and help lob potatoes and miniature tins of baked beans over your shoulder. Once, you promised you would just walk…and instead you bolted from one aisle to the next with me in hot, embarrassed pursuit. And another time, carrying you against my chest, you wrapped your arms about my neck and held your cheek to my mouth and I whispered in your ear. And no actual shopping was done that day but the kisses were nourishing.

He’s still a baby, one of my friends gently noted the other day and I opened my mouth to protest, oh no he’s a big boy , to say how much you’ve grown and changed over the past months, but instead, seeing at your soft round cheeks and your wispy curling hair, I just nodded and smiled.

This afternoon, after daycare, all smiles again, we went to the beach and I looked with a sort of wonder at your footprints in the sand as you shrieked and ran to and fro from the waves.

Mine can run Mummy, round and round, mine can run!

And I thought yes you can, my big boy baby, running round and round, yes you can.

 

Love love love to infinity 

Your very own

OvaGirl