Ode to Miss M who is big now, obviously

A funny thing has been happening lately. My baby has decided that she is a big kid. It's in her walk, in the way she looks at me, at the world and it is definitely in the way she talks to us. She is still largely nonverbal. Her vocabulary is limited to mommy, daddy, eat, book and shoe. But it is the special M language that she uses in between those words and the TONE that is involved that lets us know in uncertain terms that she is either tattling on someone, or telling us all off. I love it. I fear it. She is sassy, oh so sassy and she's not even two yet.

The thing that really played on my heart strings tonight though was an interaction we had as I tried to convince her to go to sleep. I had put her to bed as usual, but because the big kids were loud and unruly and very much NOT asleep, she began to cry--a mix of abandonment--being left out of the "fun" and fear of the unhuman screams and squeals coming out of certain boys' mouths as they slammed doors and ran around. One of M's current personality quirks is a warp speed meltdown: she can go from mildly unnerved to screaming, hiccuping hysterics in under thirty seconds. So, the crazy antics of the big kids mixed with her general exhaustion from our bedtime park outing pushed her over the edge to the bad place and it took me a while to calm her down from the unseen, imaginary horrors about which she was crying. But in the moments when the hiccups were finally subsiding and she and I were rocking, I turned my head away, just a bit, and she reached up and moved my face back to hers. I glanced away again, she quickly returned my face to hers yet again. After the third exchange, she was smirking at me, just like this:



Oh my dear sweet baby. What are we in for?