The joys of two

Things have gotten interesting lately. Dominick is making it quite clear that he is a two-year-old, thank you very much. If something doesn't go his way, he can go from sweet and happy to nightmarish in a split second. There's been lots of yelling, throwing, hitting and kicking. Graham crackers brought it on twice this week. If he's given a full sheet of graham crackers and the individual rectangles don't break exactly along the lines when he snaps them apart, he will kick and scream and refuse to touch the imperfect cracker bits. The second time it happened, I quickly swapped him one of my pristine rectangles for his broken one, and he calmed down. On Wednesday, Monica got to see a very different side of Dominick. He spent the first 20 minutes of the session throwing a tantrum after I took away a book he'd thrown twice and broken just before Monica arrived. There are just a couple of examples. It's been a lot of fun.

To help Dom adjust when he eventually goes into a preschool or parents' day out program, we're trying to encourage him to be more flexible about the way he does things. Right now, he's pretty particular. For example, he always does his train/truck/boat/airplane puzzles in that order, so one day Jacqui had him do them in a different order. He resisted but eventually worked something other than the train first. Dominick likes to chase us around the house in a big circle, and he always wants to go behind the chair in the living room, which has to be moved if he's on his tricycle. So I've started telling him we have to go another way because there isn't room. To really mix it up, we should go clockwise around the house. I wonder how he'd react to that!

By the way, I'm writing this from Naylor, MO, where we're visiting Mike's parents. I've been incredibly sick today with allergies. Does the ragweed season start earlier down here or something? Dominick has done alright, though he's had a couple of meltdowns today. Both happened because we are in a different place with different people. He did, however, behave while Mike and I went for our first meal out alone this year. We really need to find a regular babysitter, not only for us but to help Dominick get used to being around other people without us there.