A Letter to JJ (2 1/2 years)

Dear Miss JJ,

Happy half birthday!

You had just gotten used to telling people that you were two years and five months, and now I'm trying to tell you that you are two and a "half" and you don't really get this half business. I made you a shirt with "2 1/2" on it, and show you the half, and you correct me saying "No, It's a one Mummy, and here's a two, and there's another two".

Your language skills are improving. I hardly need to translate now as strangers can now understand you more and more. You're not really asking "Why?" yet, but you have started asking questions that you know the answer to.  Such as "what that one called?", whilst pointing to a funnel or whatever. At first I was answering, but now I ask you if you know, and most of the time you can answer yourself.

Of course, being two, you are constantly saying "No I do it, I do it. I can do it all by myself. Look, I did it. I did it. I did it all by myself, alone."

One of my favourite things that you've said this month was your dad asked, "what's for morning tea?" You said "Honey-doo meyon skews Daddy. What was you hoping for?" I think the answer was standing right in front of him.

We started and stopped toilet training this month. You were very keen on wearing your undies, but not so keen on sitting on the toilet or potty. You will go, but it takes a lot of cajoling to get you on there, and you never initiate it. Naturally accidents happen, and you've been getting a bit upset about them lately, so we've got you back in nappies and we'll try again soon.

You've also started to drop your day nap, and have missed it most days this week. Previously if you missed a sleep it would be disastrous, but now you seem to be able to cope quite well, keeping chirpy through the afternoon. We still try to sleep every day, but if it doesn't happen, them I explain instead that it is "quiet time", and we play upstairs with your dress ups or read books etc for a few hours. It does mean that Mummy loses her mid-afternoon down time though :(

We've introduced a new TV show "Charlie & Lola". You also seem to need to role-play at the moment, and would be involved in some sort of role-playing play constantly. You often want to role-play the story of a book or a TV show over and over again. So with Charlie and Lola being a big influence this month, this has flowed over into your roleplaying games. "Daddy, I Lola. You Charlie", is heard at least a dozen times a day.

You've been showing a desire to learn letters ever since you saw the episode "Too Many Big Words". You can already recognise J & A, and the numbers 1, 2 & 3. You start pointing them out on number plates, in books, etc. A few months ago you would clam up if I tried to brought up learning letters, I think you were embarrassed that you didn't know them. But now that you've seen that Lola struggled with this too, you seem happy to learn, indeed requesting to learn.

You continue to rely heavily on your dummy and rubbing my belly button as comforters. This had increased significantly around the time Bee was born, but I was expecting it to have ebbed by now. Your obsession with my belly button has morphed from wanting to touch it with your hands to wanting to touch it with your feet. I'm doing my best to quash this, but you are as stubborn as only a 2.5 year old can be. It feels like such an invasion of my personal space, but I keep telling myself "this too will pass".

Behaviourally, you've been running away a lot this month. Whether at the park or the shopping centre, you get this idea in your head, and you turn and bolt for hundreds of metres in the other direction. If you turn around and see me following, you get upset, so clearly you are trying to lose me. And then when you do get out of my sight, you hide. It's embarrassing, frustrating and very dangerous. I see other mothers thinking "Why can't you control your child?", (or maybe that's just my mothers guilt imagining them judging me). Either way, I've had to stop going anywhere uncontained. We now only go to parks and play centres with fences. And we drive instead of walk there. Or we just stay home. It's the only way I can cope and keep you safe until this phase passes.

I love you as far as you can run, and back again.

xx
Mummy

Previous letters:
A Letter to JJ (2 years, 5 months)
A Letter to JJ (2 years, 4 months)


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(This post is not sponsored. All opinions are my own.)

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