I feel like Allie hit her terrible 2s sometime last week on vacation. She definitely protests when we want her to do something, go somewhere, not because there’s any reason she doesn’t want to do that thing or go wherever, but because it wasn’t HER idea. If she decides to go where we’re going, or if we offer it to her and she takes us up on it, then it’s fine. This has made a lot of things challenging, because she’ll protest loudly and drop to her knees and raise up her arms when we try to pick her up if she’s not moving.

She also gets frustrated if she’s saying a word that we’re not understanding. She’ll point and say “bru?” and we have to figure out what “bru” is.
“Blue?” She shakes her head, frowning.
“Balloon?” She shakes her head again, her face crumpling. A third wrong guess gets a frustrated shriek out of her and a near-tears wail. She tries hard with the language thing. Sometimes it comes out very clear. “Doctor” is a new favorite word thanks to a Sesame Street musical video about the people in your neighborhood. “A doctor is a person in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neigh-bor-hooooood…” I sometimes wake up with the song already playing in my head.

The biggest challenge right now is food. In the last week, while we were on vacation, I spent the first day during her naptime chopping and steaming a ton of her favorite veggies. Carrots, edamame, things I can’t even remember anymore. She happily wolfed a lot of the veggies down the first and second days, and then decided she was sick of carrots. She’s refused carrot since. I stopped giving her edamame the rest of the week so she recently started eating them again. She is now refusing all of my one-pot porridge stews, and prefers to eat things separately, especially if it’s what we’re eating, also. She just seems to be over the baby stuff and into the grownup stuff. Anything new, she loves. She’s been wolfing down grapes but seems to be tired of bananas and strawberries. Melons are hit and miss. Grilled fish, she loves (for now). Mediterranean food has been a huge hit and she’ll gobble up the rice (which she says as she eats it) with the seasoned ground chicken and ground beef kabobs. I stir steamed zucchini in there to give her some greens, which she’ll still happily eat. Sometimes the pickiness can be resolved by giving her control, such as simply handing her the spoon or fork. Sometimes she’ll ask for the spoon (“boon?”). Suddenly food she’s been spitting out and refusing to eat when fed to her will be voluntarily shoveled into her own mouth and happily eaten. This is going to be such a challenge, since the pre-made food was so much easier. I make a big pot at one time and freeze squares for her, and in the mornings, we pop a square out and let it thaw for her lunch and for her dinner. I’m not going to be home to cook for her on weekdays so I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can see Jayne going through the whole “I can’t do this, I can’t do this” thing again if Allie is fussy at mealtimes with her. I think variety is good for Allie, tho. We went to Souplantation yesterday and going through the salad bar, we just made her a plate with a scoop of everything. Peas, olives, hard-boiled egg pieces, garbanzo beans, butternut squash bits, etc., popped the plate in front of her, and let her have at it. And she did. Not sure how I’d recreate that at home.

We just came from Disneyland. We decided to bring a lightweight stroller for the first time, and sometimes she’d sit in it, other times when you ask her if she wants to go in the stroller, she’ll shake her head and look like she’s about to cry. So when I was carrying her, I asked if she wanted to walk. She shook her head, whimpering. I asked if she wanted to sit in the stroller. Same response. I asked if she wanted me to hold her. Same response. Putting her down, she refuses to move and yet refuses to be picked up as well. It was like she was always on the verge of crying. In the car on the way home, because she refused to eat the porridge, she finished her edamame and papayas and was still hungry, and kept asking for “waffle.” I didn’t have any of course, so she cried the entire way home. I tried the porridge repeatedly (and it’s good, cornish game hen I stewed with brown rice and chopped carrots, celery, onion, all made from scratch) and even seeing it, smelling it made her cry more. I hope this phase passes quickly. It’s not cute.