"I prefer the roller coaster"

Whoa. Really, someone could have warned me about about this age. Don't get me wrong - we are still having a lot of fun with Lily, but all I can say right now is "whoa". To say Lily is a handful would be putting it mildly. She has become opinionated about everything. What she wants to do, when she wants to do it, and how she wants to do it are Lily's top priorities, and anything that does not conform to her expectations is simply unacceptable.

Carl has started calling out stats (too much time spent at the hospital maybe?) when Lily reacts in various ways. The most popular right now is "We've got loss of tone". What Carl is referring to is Lily's loss of muscle tone. When she is unhappy with some minor thing - maybe her food is not ready fast enough, maybe the lid won't go on a container just right, maybe I can't hold her when I'm making dinner, (the list goes on and on) - she falls to the ground like a wet noodle. Undoubtedly, the frustration is real for her, but the drama is purely for our benefit. I will say, she is typically easily consoled with some added attention, but it can make for a very exhausting day for us.

Honestly, I think right now we are just experiencing some growing pains. Lily is able to assert herself in ways that she formally could not which results in us having to set limits we formally did not have to enforce. For example, Lily can now open all doors in the house (besides the front door). This weekend, she was determined that she was going to open the basement door, go down the stairs and spend some time in the cold basement. Sorry, no, no, and...no. Carl and I had to quickly come up with a solution to this problem, so we swapped door handles with another door in the house so that the basement door now has a lock on it. Lily was frustrated at first, but now she seems to have accepted that the basement door no longer works properly. I'm not sure what we are going to do when she figures out locks, but hopefully, she will be able to go up and down the stairs on her own by then.

The other part of the problem is that while we have enjoyed the winter, lately we have had really yucky weather (freezing rain on top of snow) that makes it impossible, or at least not fun, to go out. Today was one such day. We are so ready to be able to go on family walks, take Terra to the dog park, have play dates at the park and do generally anything outdoors besides running from a building to the car as quickly as possible. Spring, where are you?

I don't want to leave the impression that Lily is a pure terror and that it is all work and no play here because that is certainly not the case. She's just required us to work a little harder lately is all. But, there are soo many things that make this stage well worth it. Here are few of the highlights in my day...

• When Lily gets my glasses for me first thing in the morning
• When she throws the ball to Terra and tries to give Terra her bone
• When she touches my nose so that I'll say "Pee-ew" and she laughs and laughs
• When she says "bye-bye da da" when Carl takes Terra on a walk
• When she says new words (this weekend she said good girl, monkey, chick, truck, roar (for a lion), and mouth)
• Her enormous hugs
• When she hides behind the curtains to play peekaboo
• When she runs down the hall when I'm running her bath water so that I'll chase her and tickle her
• When she strokes my hair as she's drifting off to sleep

There's really so many things that I couldn't possibly name them all here, and they are all priceless. So, we'll get through this phase and all new challenges in parenting that await us with the knowledge that we are incredibly lucky just to be parents.