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Last post I complained about the fact that Dash is going through his mommy phase, but the other shoe that’s dropped some time before that is that he’s crashed headlong into his terrible twos. At 31 months, Dash has eased into it over time, but in the last six weeks his behavior has definitely registered as terrible twos.

While the mommy thing sort of took me by surprise, the TT scenario was something that I’d been expecting even before we got him, having witnessed a few fits over the years from the kids of friends and strangers alike. Every parent seems to talk about surviving the terrible twos and I’m on board with that. There is nothing awesome about watching your child have a hysterical fit where they throw themselves on the floor scream bloody murder. When he does it in private I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself during these tantrums. When he does it in public there’s that and then fact that he is scaring the crap out of whomever happens to be nearby — I’m not really one of those parents embarrassed by public outbursts, but I am keenly aware that its best to get him to stop screaming so people don’t have to listen to the human siren as they eat their dinner in a restaurant.

The plus side to all this acting out is that Dash is starting to pay attention to the world around him and becoming more engaged. Some things don’t go his way, which pisses him off, but the flip side of it is that he’s also finding some things delightfully funny. He’ll point at something or someone and giggle. Oftentimes its stuff I wouldn’t even give a second thought — he’ll repeatedly look at the sky and shout “blue sky” even if it’s cloudy.

More than that, he’s changing my behavior, albeit forcibly. He’ll stop and look at something forever on the sidewalk as we try to go somewhere. I’m the guy (a typical urbanite) trying to walk with purpose because we’ve got places to go, and he’s the boy who stops as we walk past a bush or a bed of flowers and smells them and touches them. It is magical to see and wholly a gift to me.

Understandably, some of his behavior at this point just doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes I’ll sit in a chair or on a couch and he’ll have a complete fit, screaming nonsensical instructions that essentially tell me to move. He screams if I can’t figure out what he wants (there’s a lot gray area right now with his vocabulary) or choose not to
accommodate (right or wrong, I feel that a child shouldn’t always be able to bully his parents around with the threat of an outburst).

This sort of engagement and opinion makes this twos things amazing — I’m now witnessing first hand a human being joining the human race, finding things that tickle his fancy and things that piss him off. The learning curve is steep and uncharted, which makes the whole terrible twos thing an adventure for him, and for the rest of us around him too.