Just in case we forget

Adam and Dova's favorite activity is jumping off the couch.

Parental amnesia is a wonderful thing because you'd strangle your kids if you remembered all the exasperating things they do. I remember that Adam had a terrible year between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2, culminating right around the time Dova was born after he had turned 3. But when I try to remember exactly what he did or how he acted, nothing specific comes to mind. I only remember a conversation with my mom while I was in the hospital giving birth. She said that he was totally out of control, throwing things on top of the fridge and that we'd find all sorts of stuff behind there someday (a few years later, we sent him behind the fridge for some other reason and he fished the stuff out). And as bad as he was, Dova was much worse. And it lasted way past 3 1/2. But lately, almost imperceptibly, she has actually gotten better. During our recent getaway to Newport, she didn't have any meltdowns in front of the grandmas, where last year she pushed one of the grandmas to a breakdown through all her tantrums. And although she will still argue the fact that she doesn't need to go to the bathroom when she wakes up, before bed or anytime we ask her to go, she has actually sometimes been more cooperative than her brother in other areas. Could it be that she is finally getting past her terrible two's and three's?

So this post is a reminder just in case we forget all of her toddler antics. Like when we were in a gift shop in the Orlando Int'l Airport and she found out that the lollipop she wanted (the last remaining of its kind) had a torn wrapper and I refused to buy it. We headed towards airport security and she had a screaming kicking tantrum on the floor for 20 minutes and we ran into someone that we hadn't seen in years. Fortunately she also had kids so she totally understood the "Oh, ignore the screaming child on the ground, that's not ours."

Or the time we went to Chunky's Cinema to watch Mr. Bean and she didn't want to go. We had to drag her screaming through the entrance to the theater and we had to leave her screaming in the back hallway. We sat down and pretended we didn't know who that screaming child was before she finally calmed down and joined us. And then she had to sit on my lap the entire time and wouldn't sit in her seat. All for a fun family activity on Labor Day.

And last but not least, this past weekend when I went grocery shopping. We got an extra large cart so she could sit inside with the food. I'm used to the fact that my kids are the loudest, craziest kids in the entire store and as long as they are not getting too many looks that aren't knowing smiles, not crashing the cart, not drawing blood and not putting things in the cart that I don't approve, I usually don't intervene (which means I am intervening every two minutes). This time they were playing some sort of war game with the Jet Dry. While I had turned away to pick out string beans, I hear a thud behind me and Dova had just dropped a bag of apples out of the cart. It was a bomb, she explains. Arrgghh!

I am grateful that she is slowly but surely getting better, but that only means that she is growing up. And soon she'll be too smart for her own good like her brother. Just last night Adam asked me whether house spiders live in the walls of a house. I replied that I didn't know. He shot back with "How can you go to MIT if you don't know if house spiders live in the walls?" Yikes, is he already realizing that his parents are fallible? Better brush up on my knowledge of everything.