About the time the twins turned two we hit a point where we would look at each other, wide-eyed, at the end of the day, and say “Well. DinoBoy is alive. It was a good day.”
We all know what that phase is where you just hope they survive the day. Toddlers stretch your comfort zone with every step they take.
The kid was the worst of monkey toddlers. There wasn’t anything in the house he couldn’t climb. We were regularly pulling him off of dressers, getting his head unstuck from between stair rails, unstacking piles of books and toys that he had strategically stacked to reach tops shelves, and snatching him from the brink of death in other various and sundry ways.
(Edit: 10/18/17 — TinyOne has surpassed DinoBoy as our worst and best climber yet. I can’t even hope to contain her. We just pray.)
And don’t think he didn’t do it on purpose. His favorite thing to do was to climb onto the table and inch backward until his heels were off the edge, then rock back and forth on his toes. He would crack up with demon cackles as we screeched and tripped and slid our way past the rocking horses, jenga blocks, hot wheels, and legos to dive underneath him.
He would occasionally throw in a trust fall, just to make sure we were fully gray before he turned three.
But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was 3 months later, after we acknowledged he was a mountain goat and let him climb without panic. Once we were calmly setting him back on the ground, the novelty of it was gone, and he pretty much has stayed on the ground since.
But no, the worst wasn’t the teetering death balances of DinoBoy. The worst was his twin sister, SunshineGirl, when she started figuring out how to open things. Not just *things*… doors, outlet covers, the fridge, the litter box, child proof caps, padlocks, bank vaults…
So, I exaggerate. Or maybe I don’t. Since we have yet to hand her a padlock or stick her in a bank’s back room, I’m not entirely sure.
All this to say — just get through today. Healthy kids in a loving home will do fine! Don’t sweat the small stuff. So what if SunshineGirl just broke into a jar of gummy vitamin C and got enough of them swallowed whole before you could pick yourself up from sliding through
TinyOne’s spitup, (which happened because you practically pulled NASA level G’s jumping off the couch with her in arm) that she’s gonna have seriously runny diapers for the next day or so.
Roll with it. Have fun telling it.
And if you tuck them into bed still breathing, call it a good day. Even if you look like this.
-Joanna
