teeter toddling

Ah the many faces of my girl -- the cruiser, the wildcat, the thinker...


Eliana is really embracing the ambiguity of toddler-hood lately. It's always been weird to me that there's only one word for all the years between one and, say, four. How can these vast developments even be categorized together? But Eliana, while not quite ready for pre-school, certainly seems to be walking the spectrum these days. She is an explorer, an independent operator, a huge flirt, a total ham, and on a constant voyage of discovery. She loves to go around in the car now that she has a big girl carseat and faces forward. I love it because I can watch all the crazy faces she makes while I'm driving (while, of course, watching the road ever so carefully because I'm driving with my peach in the car). She also zips around the house and finds herself in every nook and cranny. Sometimes I have these momentary traumas when I can't immediate locate her. Of course she's always lurking, happily, in some random corner getting into some equally random thing.

Today she discovered mommy's purse. She had already discovered mommy's silver bangles. So she's wearing my bangles and pulling lipsticks and faded receipts and other goodies out of my disaster of a bag. She was so happy, so content, just to go through all the contents, make her little discoveries, and move on. Her favorite thing was this lip gloss wand that she just sort of wove around in the air with one hand, while the other hand kept busy pulling out the goods. She's such a little buddy now, such a BFF.

And then she still has her baby moments. Like last night when Jeff had to call me back from my girl's night because she had woken up screaming. She was totally out of sorts and we couldn't figure it out. I was rocking her and walking around the house like I used to. I finally nursed her to comfort, all the while she heaved and hyperventilated and blew snot and, eventually, came back down. Holding her in my arms, rocking her like that, with such determination and commitment, with this force of following a deeply rooted instinct, filled me with this sense of nostalgia for when this sort of meltdown was a daily thing. She felt so heavy in my arms, so long and different to the teeny thing that used to need to be shushed and swayed. But oh what satisfaction. To know what to do, to succeed and allow her to surrender and just be tiny and helpless. To help her just be a baby again.