What a Day!

Two year olds! One day they spend all day driving you nuts and the next day they're all smiles and fun. Today was one of those crazy fun days for us. Bree was giving me all kinds of funny material...

She started out this morning by playing with her Strawberry Shortcake dolly. She was playing along and she said, "Mom, see my dolly?" "Very nice," I told her, "Her name is Strawberry Shortcake did you know that?" "Oh..Strawberry Suitcase," she said. Then she spent some time playing with "Strawberry Suitcase."

We also had to run some errands this morning. For one thing, we needed to buy a new blender. (I exploded mine trying to make Bree a fruit smoothie for breakfast..don't ask..) For some reason we had an eventful time just trying to get from our front door to the car. First off there were some ducks eating next to the stairs on the way down. One duck was pecking stuff up in the grass and another one was poking it's beak around in some rocks. Brianna pointed to the first duck, "It's eating grass!" Then she pointed to the other duck, "He's eating rocks!" "Well," I said, "He's not really eating rocks, he's just finding stuff in between the rocks." But, at that point she wasn't listening since she'd spotted a squirrel as well. "Hey, Mom! Look, did you see that squirrel?!" "Sure did, I think he's looking for nuts," I told her. "I'm gonna help find his nuts...Hey NUTS!"

Once we got to the store Bree was quite good since now they have carts with little cars hooked on the front at our store. Bree likes to sit in the car and pretend to drive while I push the cart around. The car even has a little beepy horn in it and Bree will honk at people as we go by! Of course, she gets kinda frustrated with me when I stop to actually put an item in the cart since that makes her car stop too. She'll lean out and say, "Go Mom, drive!" So, picture me racing around the store and trying to throw things from my list into the cart by merely slowing down, rather than actually stopping. I saw a few cute things that I thought would be good stocking stuffers for Brianna and thought I was adding them to the cart pretty sneakily. But, alas, she managed to see my every move and was quickly whining for toys I was trying to hide. Once we got home I realized that I'd done it again...that is bought enough groceries that I couldn't really get them, and my kid, all up the stairs at the same time. Dilemma. See, I don't want to make more than one trip since then my choices are try to leave Bree in the apartment unsupervised while I make one or two more trips (totally unadvisable) or drag her up and down with me, which isn't very fun. So, I decided to use the old stroller trick. In this scenario I pile all the groceries into the stroller, (it actually holds like 10 bags), and push that up the handicap ramp, through the doors and into the elevator and voila! One trip grocery unloading. (Did I mention I hate trying to get groceries home to the second floor?) The drawback to this particular manuever is that I can't really carry Brianna and push that heavy of a stroller both at the same time, and she usually freaks out that she can't be sitting in the stroller while I push it along. (Of course, most the time she refuses to sit in it at all but when there's groceries in her spot then...) So, we ended up walking into the apartment with me gently pushing along my pram full of groceries and my kid dragging her feet behind me, whining and poking along like a slug. I'm sure we looked quite interesting to any passers-by. By then it was getting to be lunch time followed shortly by naptime. (Much to my relief.)

After all that when dinner time rolled around I decided I was too exhausted to cook. So, I ordered pizza! When the pizza guy came to the door Bree said, "Who's that Mommy?" "It's the delivery guy," I told her. We sat down to dinner and she actually ate two whole slices of pizza! (Ruining my theory that she's not a very good eater.) Afterwards she was running around the house going, "Mom, I'm a wijery (delivery) guy!" and handing me a toy or a block or something. Who knew that pretending to be a "wijery guy" could provide an hours worth of entertainment? I see an illustrious career ahead of her already.

Finally, just before bedtime Bree turns to me and says, "Mom, wanna run in the halls?" Well, I didn't really but I figured it would be a good way to burn off some pre-bedtime energy for her. So,we headed into the halls and she takes off. Then she noticed a guy walking in the hallway, carrying his laundry to the laundry room. "Mom, who's that... a guy?" she asks. "Yep," I say. "Is he doing his laundry?" she asks. "Yep," I say. We walked along behind him for awhile and then he turned into the laundry room. He managed to drop a sock on the floor in the process. I picked it up, handed it to Brianna and told her she'd need to go give it back to him. I opened the door and she strolled in there, holding the guy's sock out in front of her like it's dead or something. He saw her coming and kinda chuckled. "Thanks," he said. "You're welcome," she replied primly. Then we finished up our walk and I put her to bed.

Whew! You see? Totally wipes me out every day... and that's not even telling everything that happened!