Hard day today. My son is a toddler. I don’t know how many of you have spent every waking moment with a toddler for months on end. But if you have, then you’ll know that some days are hard.
We go outside and sit in the grass most days. I listen to him talk about whatever. It’s still mostly babble, although coherence is poking through. He’s got a great vocabulary (I’d reckon about 200 words) but for the most part it’s just a stream of sound. It’s lovely.
Today, however, he woke up ready to scrap. Whatever we were doing, he was against it. After a fun wrestling session, we made our daily trip outside. He wanted to play with his splash table, so I told him we’d need to go around the house and turn the hose on. He didn’t want to go. I convinced him after a while, and we went and turned it on. Then he became fascinated by the water dripping from where the hose connects to the spigot. “Come on,” I said. “Now we need to fill up the splash table.”
You can guess how that went. Then how turning the hose off went. Then how going inside to get changed out of wet clothes went. Then how getting in the car to go to the post office went. Lunch was easy, though. I picked up french fries. I had no fight left.
Online will remind you that you never get these moments back. To cherish them. I understand the sentiment. It’s kind of like taking a beautiful hike with a rash all over your face. Cherish the view, the voice inside of you says as your face feels like it’s on fire. You only live once.
Of course, it’s not all bad, or even mostly bad. We played with toys, practiced counting, and he showed me his favorite planets in his space book (Mars, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn…he just calls Mercury “hot”). I turned on Blaze for an hour and chatted with Kelby on the phone. Blaze is a monster truck that talks.
And now he’s napping. Before he fell asleep, he wrapped his arms around my neck and babbled softly into my hair.
I’ve never experienced anything like it. Something so difficult that you can feel your mind coming apart followed by something so sweet you can feel your heart break a little. The ups and downs of these days are almost psychedelic. The whiplash is crazy.
Broken River Blog 