Magrilless

I love Maggie’s newest phase. The “mother may I” phase. Lately she has just been asking that question about all sorts of things. “May I play with this?” “May I go outside?” “May I have some water?” “May I color?” I really don’t remember telling her to ask for permission in this way. But I love it! And everyone thinks she’s the most polite, well-behaved child. We don’t tell them about the persistent interest in spitting or her newfound fascination with picking her nose all the time everywhere. We’ll just concentrate on this “may I” and be proud.

She’s also gotten super brave in the water. Last time we went to the pool with Baka Sue in tow, she went down one of the slides by herself. She used to make me hold her hand all the way down, but by the end of this visit she was going up and down while we just sat in the water and clapped. She also took it upon herself to lay back in the water and look at the ceiling. She won’t even do that in the bath. It was very shallow water where she was experimenting so her bum was still on the bottom of the pool, but she was going so far as to have water flow almost to her eyes. I’ll have to look into swimming lessons pretty soon. Oh boy!

When you’re two, Easter must be nearly as exciting as Christmas. We prepared Maggie for the Easter Bunny’s arrival and she was up and running on Sunday, looking for those eggs “hiding candy!” The first one she found, she shook and demanded that it be opened for her inspection. And of course, not just visual inspection, but culinary as well. And the second one too. And the third. And on to the seventeenth. Somewhere along the line she started asking for multiple jelly beans out of each egg and passed the extras along to us. How generous!

We also went to a friend’s house for brunch where there was a multi-kid backyard hunting bonanza. Mags left off opening each one as it was discovered in favor of finding as many as possible. She didn’t catch on to the concept of carrying her own basket, so I held it for her and she would run from one find back to me to another one back to me. Until she found a soccer ball and then she couldn’t be bothered with eggs or candy anymore; she just wanted to run around the zigzags of other kiddos dribbling her ball. Fine by us parents!

All in all, I’d say we escaped most of the sugar high-crash-high-crash bane of Easters (thank you soccer ball and cheesy egg casserole) and instead just had a really pleasant day. By the end we were all exhausted — exhausted — but happy. And today I’m happy still since Mags seems to have forgotten that her eggs came with candy and only asks for a pez after she pees. More jelly beans for mom!

This has been kind of a week of tested boundaries. Maggie wants to know how infuriated we can get when she deliberately does the opposite of what we ask or when she completely ignores a question. Sometimes I felt like yelling in her face “I know you understand English!” But parenting requires a little bit of control, so there have been some consequences she hasn’t been all too pleased with, but mostly controlled tempers (on the parents’ side at least).

The other half of the time (I know, probably more like 85%), she is the sweetest thing. I love it when she talks to me like I’m a baby. She dips her chin low, looks up at me with huge eyes and raised eyebrows, and sing-songs some instruction while giving a few little nods: “We’re going to go over here now. Okaaaaay?” And when we had a dinner party with some friends, all the other kids stayed at their table for five minutes before racing off, crashing toys around and calling for mom. Maggie sat at the kids’ table for probably half an hour, occasionally bringing her plate to me for more noodles and beans. When other kids got close on a pass-by, she’d offer up some of their food from their plate, and if they refused, well, Maggie did ask first if they wanted it.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There’s a reason God makes em cute (85% of the time).

Sometimes my favorite thing is just to watch and listen to Maggie and see what she comes up with herself. Today she took apart the papasan chair and went visiting her friends in the zoo. One day I walked into the kitchen and she had arranged all of her letter magnets by color. Earlier this week I heard a strange sound and found her jumping on the couch with a bucket over head. Every time she jumped the bucket would bonk on the top of her head. She thought it was great.

And the way she misinterprets some things just makes me smile. One of the songs we sing goes “Sweetly sings the donkey at the break of day. If you do not feed him this is what he’ll say. Hee haw hee haw.” Maggie likes this song; we sing it a lot. But when she sings it, it goes “Sweeping up the donkey…” And he gets fed in her version too, lucky guy.

It was spring! For an entire week, it was warm and sunny and gorgeous and prime outside playing weather. Mags and I spent a lot of time outside in the yards. Digging, repairing, tidying, cleaning up, dreaming, planning, and making messes. Maggie has a radar for puddles and mud. We’ll be at the park playing with friends; I look up and she’s on the other side tromping through the soggiest part of the lawn she can find. Oftentimes she has to ride home completely naked because I just can’t let go quite that much with the car and carseat. When she walks Eliza in the afternoon, our rule is always dry on the way out, puddles on the way back. Then we stop at the bottom of our street for a half an hour while she runs from one corner to the opposite, through the biggest, widest, deepest puddle in the whole neighborhood. Most every day there’s at least two pairs of shoes on the front porch drying off and waiting to be whammed against the sidewalk to loosen the mud clumps.

She’s also really interested by spitting. Sometimes I’ll walk into a room to find her on all fours staring at the floor, blowing raspberries to see the patterns her spit makes. When she has to go to timeout, I used to place her on the hearth for her minute and a half. But then she just started to spit on the bricks to amuse herself until the timeout timer went off. Now I have to place her on a rug and move the furniture out of the way so there’s no visible spitting surface. At times she thinks it’s also amusing to spit out milk or food, because that’s much more interesting than saliva, but mostly that one has disappeared thanks to the “then your meal is over” rule. I guess I should be thankful that she’s good at amusing herself and thus hardly ever bored.