Three and Thirty

At 3 months, he is my angel child. 
Happy, peaceful, and adorable.

At 30 months, she is my wild child. 
Fiesty, impetuous, and unpredictable.

At 3 months, he coos and gurgles, and makes the most delicious baby sounds.

At 30 months, she sings her own songs, adding new verses to existing rhymes, or fitting different words to familiar tunes. She 'reads', tells stories, and is constantly telling everyone in the household what to do, how, and when.

At 3 months, he lies in his rocker waiting quietly for someone to come over to him and chat, rewarding them with a gummy smile and a full body wriggle of excitement when they do.

At 30 months, she has a full scale meltdown if  she doesn't get what she wants within a nanosecond of her ordering it.

At 3 months, he has his meals with lip-smacking, boob-thumping enthusiasm.

At 30 months, her meals give the term 'dinner theatre' a whole new meaning.

At 3 months, he stares adoringly into my face as I prop him up against my knees and sing to him American Idol style, complete with funny facial expressions and hand gestures.

At 30 months, she watches my performance critically for all of 5 seconds before commanding, 'Mama, don't sing!'

At 3 months, he shows no interest in wanting to turn or roll, lying peacefully on his playmat, observing his own hands and his sister's antics with interest.

At 30 months, she roams the house carrying a high plastic stool, so that she can be 'big and tall' and reach all sorts of forbidden places.

At 3 months, he perks up at the sound of music, smiling and 'singing' along with little grunts and sighs.

At 30 months, she picks a beat on the electronic keyboard and yells out: 'Ebbybody dance!', boogying with such enthusiasm and style as to get even her double left-footed father to join her.

At 3 months, his eyes flick open from the deepest sleep at the sound of her voice. His eyes follow her around the room, and his brightest smiles are always for her. 

At 30 months, she has not yet made up her mind whether she likes this big sister gig. 

At 3 months, he is a cuddly bundle of happiness, radiating contentment and that milky baby smell.

At 30 months, she is a prickly ball of energy, her sunny charm inexplicably transforming into stormy rage with alarming suddenness.

Three and thirty. Together, they are exhausting, entertaining, and utterly endearing.

A big sister's prerogative

Big sis, baby bro.

Come 'ere, you knucklehead.

Don't be scared, I only want to kiss you.

I also want to squash you like a bug, what fun!

It's okay, we're like this only.

And so the saga continues: she loves him one minute, hates him the next. He's just bewildered by it all.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

She's such a contrary Mary, these days. Whatever we say or do, she MUST say and do the opposite.

Sometimes, we use this to our advantage. Take for example, this scene from last week:

Moppet is doing her 'nangu run' after her evening bath, where she scoots around the house without a stitch on her. She ends up in the study and screams, 'Look, I'm nangu!' expecting her father to get up and do what he usually does - chase her back to her room where I wait with her pyjamas and then join in the epic struggle to get her into them.

But this time, her father decides to take a different approach. 'Wow!' he says, 'How nice! Don't wear any clothes tonight ok?'

Contrary Mary is instantly up in arms. 'No! I wear clothes!'

Her father senses he's onto a good thing and doesn't back down. 'No, no! No clothes for you!'

'NO, NO, NOOOOOOO! I WEAR CLOTHES!' a screaming Moppet rushes into her room and is in her pyjamas in under 30 seconds.

So now we use this trick off and on, but of late the results have been rather unreliable. Like today, at lunch:

Mama (spooning a big heap of beans and potato curry onto her plate): Mmm! Nice beans. No beans for Moppet ok?

Moppet: (grinning widely) 'kay! I eat onny ice cream.

Silly Sunday Som-solts

(Or How Mama Got Her Groove Back :-)

Sunday evening was pleasant and breezy, and since both the kids were up and alert, all four of us went down to the little park in our building. The husband and I sat on a bench with Munch and watched Moppet show off for us.

'Mama, look! Papa, look!' she squealed as she clambered up the slide the wrong way, monkeyed her way up the frame of the swing set, and drove the toy train to 'Andabaad'. (And elaborated so that silly Mama wouldn't get the wrong idea: 'Onny aeroplane go to Andabaad. I driving choo-choo train to air-a-port.')

Her favourite thing in the park is the huge, net-enclosed trampoline that the pre-teen kids do amazing stunts on. With no one else in the park waiting their turn for the trampoline, she was able to jump as much as she wanted.

Which was a lot, and for a long time, and soon Munch began to get cranky. So the husband took him back home, while I waited for Moppet to get all bounced-out.

'Mama, come jump!' she ordered, 'Like that! Come jump!' I hadn't been on a trampoline in a long, long time, and it did look like a lot of fun, so I climbed up and joined her. She squealed with delight as we bounced together holding hands, then took turns sitting in the centre while the other jumped around and over the one in the middle.

'Mama, look! I do som-solt!' she said, tumbling head over heels three times in quick succession. 'Now Mama's turn!'

'No baby, I'm wearing a skirt. I can't do somersaults.'

She studied me for a moment and then asked 'Onny boys do som-solt?'

'What? No, of course not! Everyone can do somersaults.'

'Mama iss not to do som-solt?' Sad face and bambi eyes.

'No, no. I can do somersaults, ok? See!' I demonstrated.

She giggled, did a couple more herself, and sat up looking at me challengingly. What the heck, I thought, the park's empty anyway, and I did a few more. So we tumbled around on the trampoline, doing som-solts and giggling and squealing like the two silly girls we were.

Later, dizzy and exhausted, we lay flat on our backs on the trampoline, looking up at the sky and pointing out funny cloud shapes. A vague suspicion crept into my mind. Was it possible that my two year old had tricked me into doing those somersaults? She wasn't that smart, was she?

Naah!

Maybe.

Ah, who cares? It was the most fun I'd had in ages!