You all ask me how I like the 'terrible twos' as if expecting me to say, "...well, they are terrible!" This is my response to the world, my description of two and what I am learning from it. It is as random as the age, and as honest... and it will be added to often.

(March 25, 2000)

Two still loves pictures of herself. How long ago did I lose that degree of self-acceptance? When did I start thinking of myself as unphotogenic and warning friends and family that my snapshot might just break the camera? Two gets excited to see her face in the morror and practices smiling there. Two tells me each morning after I comb her hair, "I'm bee-a-fo!" And she IS beautiful. With pudding form head to toe, naked as a jaybird, in nothing but bright pink polka dot panties, neck deep in spaghetti noodles, mud-caked, first-thing-in-the-morning, straight out of the bathtub, covered in marker scribbles or sleeping...she is beautiful and she knows it, but expects nothing for it. Two likes her smile and her hair She tells me, "I have BROWN eyes," and they twinkle when she says so. "What color YOU eyes, Mommy?" "Blue," I answer and wonder if I love my eyes like she loves hers. Brown like Daddy's, and how she enjoys that connection with him.

She loves her teeth because they are like mine. We both have toenails, a particular fascination. And nipples. Mine are big and hers are little, and she likes to sleep there because they are soft like pillows. Her toes are little too, she says. Mine are big. And she loves to see how big or small they are by tracing around them on a paper.(this also tickles a lot). How many feet can fit on one paper? Well, as many as she likes because nobody told her they shoudln't overlap. Ten. Twenty. Seventeen. Four. Wow, that's a lot! And suddenly the page is full, we must have new paper. And she runs to her special drawer where the paper is kept and finds a new paper and the picture shse filled up yesterday and brings them both to me. "Wookit, mom! My pit-er in yessiday! Bee-a-fo!" She draws what she loves. She loves hearts and balls and puppies and smiles and anything orange. She drew brown eyes on all the lions in the Lion King book, just like Daddy. She drew a puppy in the hallway on the wall that was white, just like a very big piece of paper. I had to ask, of course, what it was because it was such a unique sort of puppy, with lots of curly-q's and long straight lines. And she was so proud of her creation, there in bright orange crayon for all eternity. (Her artwork is apparently intended for generations to come and is entirely unremoveable)

Her artists tools are not what you might expect. Creative juices flow best not from the jumbo crayons, but from Mommy's gelpens and colored pencils. She sits on her tiny orange chair which she carries from room to room looking for the most creative spot and adjusts tiny yellow-framed glasses with pink-framedpop-up shades...oh so cool. THey work best half-way up her forehead, she has found. A string of Mom's pearls is also necessary and if the glasses fall down onto her nose while she is chewing on the pearls, she instructs them to "get back up there, silly!"

Coincidentally, these same props used for artistic creation are quite appropriate for movie watching, as long as the movie can be watched repeatedly, back-to-back at least three times. Favorites are "Fantasia" and "Riverdance." When dancing to Riverdance, it is most important that one wears black shoes with no socks. Another piece of standard equipment. Today there happened to be some applesauce in those shoes which were found behind the garbage can in the kitchen. I received some chastizement, of course, for putting applesauce in the shoes. What was I thinking? Now you may be wondering where I was when the puppy appeared on the wall and the shoes magically grew applesauce inside them. Allow me to explain the seventh dimension of space and time...the two year old dimension. Two has an arm-span of four and a half feet and the climbing skill of a small, spider-like mountain goat. Two can stretch the fifty three seconds it takes Mom to pee and wash her hands (my time is steadily improving and I think soon I will be able to shower and btush my teeth as well in under three minutes) into the necessary period required to empty every drawer in her bedroom and fill the empty drawers with the box of fruit loops that came up missing last week and swish them around with a good dose of lotion. For the purposes of this explanation, lets just say that a two year old defies gravity, time, space and logic with inconceivable penache. Clean-up time varies depending on Mom's work schedule, but be warned-- incidents like this generally occur at one of two times: thirty seconds before Mommy has to leave for work, or thirty seconds before Mommy's date arrives.