Whiplash

The whiplash that is an almost 3 year-old!  It’s like living with a tiny teenager.  One minute Owen is all sweetness and cuddles, meeting me at the train station with a hug and an “I lub you so much,” and an “I missed you terribly,” and the next he is all spitfire and slaps, and telling me to “Go back to work.”

I need to get out the 3 Year-old book and start reading to find out when it will end and if there is something in particular we should do about it all.

A colleague at work told me that when his daughter was 3 someone told him that they realize then that they can control four things:  what goes into their body, what comes out of their body, what goes on their body, and when/whether they sleep.  And this seems to be true of Owen.  He still doesn’t eat hardly anything – and that is still a battle we are postponing, other than to keep offering him foodstuffs.  He’s toilet trained completely (yay!) but will put off taking time out of his busy schedule to use the toilet for as long as possible – and it is pretty long.  The boy has a bladder of steel.  He doesn’t care about his clothes, but he likes to control when he gets dressed in the morning (We hear a lot of “5 more minutes!” and “I want to be a nudie”).  And his naps are down to about 2 or 3 a week, if we’re lucky (although he sleeps well at night, if you call sleeping from 8:00 – 5:45 well, which I do at 8:00 and I don’t at 5:45).

He doesn’t like to leave a place – be it the playground or Target, and in the past three weeks I have several times carried a squealing squirming boy horizontally towards our car, trying not to get hit by flailing limbs in the process (he has a knack for knocking off my glasses).

So that is the bad.  And I’m hoping it gradually dissipates.  The good is the sweetness mentioned above, and the general enthusiasm for anything new (except for food), and the willingness to be a helper for anything we are doing – from inside chores to gardening to errands.  Owen wants to help.

I’ve found that he is very good at helping with baking – he likes to stir, and he likes to add ingredients to the bowl.  And he’s actually quite good at mixing and adding, as long as I don’t mind a bit of spillage.  We made cupcakes the other day when faced with a car-less rainy Saturday, and then last weekend we made corn muffins, which he wouldn’t eat, but did an excellent job concocting.  He also helps me make a dutch baby almost weekly for dinner, although he is not very pleased at the part where we put the baby in the oven to cook (he doesn’t like to stop the mixing). 

 Owen got to choose what color we made the icing.

He chose green and yellow!

He also loves to do any kind of yard work, although it is hard to get him to stop watering things once we start.  There’s always a lot of tears when we have to turn off the hose.

He does this odd thing now where he'll stop sometimes in the middle of a fit and ask us if we want to take a picture!  Or he'll do so after the fact -- if we are talking of how he was in a bad mood before, he'll ask, "Did you take a picture of me grumpy?"  Um, no, we didn't want to capture that particular moment, Owen!  On the way home from the playground the other day, he was having a tantrum in the car and asked me to take a picture of him.  See below.  

And then when I was later showing him the picture of him having a fit, he asked me, "Did you get the part where I was kicking?"  NO!  NO I DID NOT!  Which brings me full circle to the fact that almost three year-olds are strange creatures.