_____I hear the term "terrible twos" quite often, and even more often I hear mothers say, "Oh, but it wasn't the twos that were bad... it was the threes!" Hearing both of these things scares me. Maida is now 20 months old, well into her "ones," and it's bad. By bad, I mean, she is the most emotionally aggressive, most stubborn, self-centered one-year-old going on fifteen that I have ever seen. We are totally at a loss of what to do with her sometimes. Her two favorite words are "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" and "MIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!!" and she says them with either a push or a hit to accompany. She will fight with anyone, of any age, that will fight with her (including Barkley!), which brings me to our next concern.
_____Maida has recently created an imaginary friend! Her name is Carly and I think that she's from the Nickelodeon "iCarly" TV show that Maida has seen a few times (which happens to be a show for teens, not tots!). Maida will talk to Carly all day long and also yell and fight with her! Erik isn't convinced that she actually has an imaginary friend, though, rather that she is aggressive with the ways she plays with her toys and pretends that they are fighting. It's funny at first, that she is fighting with an imaginary person, but the more she does it, the more we have realized that this just might not be a good thing - both the imaginary friend (who she's obsessed with) and the fighting!
_____Luckily, Erik has been able to spend the last three weeks witnessing our sweet little girl's behavior (like the time she started strangling one of her friends) and now we've been trying to put our heads together to come up with some sort of plan. We've talked to some child development "experts" and gotten their opinion. All we keep hearing is that it's probably a stage and that there are reasons why she is going through this, the obvious being that she senses the changes coming with the new baby. Children develop their thoughts and feelings earlier than the speech to communicate those feelings, so that may play a part in her getting frustrated when she doesn't have the words to say what she wants. Maida is, at the same time, very ahead of her age group in other areas, which makes it hard to deal with the whole speech thing too, I'm sure, as she just wants to keep up with everyone else, including the older kids she plays with occasionally. We have been told, too, that we have too high of expectations for Maida at this age (is that a first child thing?).
_____Anyway, regardless of what we've heard or tried to come up with, I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has advice! Do your kids have imaginary friends? Is this a good thing/bad thing? Did you notice your children going through certain "stages" like the one Maida seems to be in when there were big changes about to take place? We love and treasure Maida so much and know that she'll turn out okay in the end, but we don't want that to be an excuse for lazy parenting and want to know that we are doing everything we can to be good parents right now. This parenting stuff sure is an adventure, isn't it? Never a dull moment, as when you get out of one stage, you enter right into another.
_____And here are just a few random pictures to wrap up with...
In Daddy's house shoes
Playing with Daddy's headlamp
Momma Kinks bowling with Wii Sports!
Abby had some too-- Right around the same age as Maida. I was really worried about it and asked about it too but it was fine. She got over it and it was just a phase. I think they are lonely. Once Skogen makes his appearance a lot will change!
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