Toddlerhood

Saturday we had one of those days with Kate that makes it very difficult to want more children. She had a complete meltdown over a pair of pants, received two spankings for throwing toys in anger and for hitting Daddy, and finally after 2 hours of utter meltdown mode she succumbed to nap time.

You know I often hear people say "It gets easier with two" and other cliche things when it comes to having kids, but I've rewound what happened on Saturday a couple of times and thrown a second kid into the mix and I fail to see how that situation would have been any easier with another child present. But apparently I know nothing. So there's that.

Then there are the days like yesterday where she wasn't a terror, but she was just a toddler. At one point in the afternoon when she was supposedly watching Dora the Explorer while Mommy got a little work done on the computer, she came running back into the office where I was (because my laptop that I normally work from in the kitchen where I can see her all the time is dead) and said she needed help cleaning up the cat food.

What?

So I followed her into the living room because she told me that's where the cat food mess was, and I quickly realized that when Kate said "cat food" she meant "cat litter" and the mess covered about 1/4 of the living room floor. She had found the almost empty box of cat food in the laundry room and for whatever reason toddler logic determined was appropriate she poured it in the floor and spread it out. So now she was using a wash rag to try and clean it all up. My first reaction was to exclaim "Kate! What did you do??" and she said "Momma, can you not yell at me?"

Now when I relayed this story to Nick later (who doubled over in laughter, by the way), Kate inserted that she was making a beach, which she had failed to tell me earlier. She has been completely obsessed with the beach ever since we went last month. I guess cat litter is the closest thing to sand that we had available.

It was an interesting day.