Reflections on a Toddler

It wasn't long after Constance came into our lives almost 3 years ago that Tom and I realized we had quite the vivacious and gregarious child on our hands.
Her being our first child, we didn't know where exactly on the spectrum of "normal" her endless squawking and late-night wakefulness fell.

At 6 months old, she was already cracking us up with her jokes and facial expressions.

As she's grown up over the years, we've noticed her sense of drama and creativity unfold.

Often she will wake up in the middle of night crying loudly because her "blankets aren't working." Today she had tears streaming down her face for a good half hour because the Band Aid on her knee was slowly falling off. She is constantly making up stories and songs and repeating them as loudly or softly she feels inclined to at the moment.

She has always been very needy emotionally. It used to take a good 2 hours to put her to bed either at night or for an afternoon nap. When she was a baby, she wanted to be held until she was completely asleep. If I tried to do the traditional recommendation of "put the baby down while she is still awake but drowsy," Constance would scream and cry for hours and hours until I acquiesced to holding her for the allotted time. She can be extremely headstrong and that was evident even while she was a baby. All attempts at sleep training just made her more and more upset so I quit trying to force her. (Ana, on the other hand, is the complete opposite.)

As I look back on that time when Constance was a baby, I've realized that the perception of "I'm doing something wrong for my child to be acting this way" is deceptive and not always true. Children have certain inclinations that are largely based on their personality. Now that Constance is older, we work with her on describing her feelings and figuring out how to deal with them. She still loves to do really high pitched screaming. But then she quietly tells me, "Mom, I'm frustrated." Then we talk about why she's frustrated. The reason is often "because I really want to wear my Elsa dress."

Constance is getting better at expressing herself in words, but in the meantime, she has all 20 facial expressions for sadness, disappointment, and discouragement down. Often she will plop down next to me and pucker out her bottom lip while closing her eyelashes and tipping her head down at an angle. She would make a great child actor.

Constance needs to have someone close by to kick and hug and pull on. In return, she is usually quite loving. She is a social butterfly and will rarely go off and play on her own for long. When she was really young I often felt exhausted keeping her happy. Tom and I still feel a bit exhausted with her at times---after all, he and I are two introverts trying to raise an extrovert daughter.

As soon as she was old enough to talk, Constance started engaging other little kids in conversation. It didn't matter if she had never seen them before or if they were twice her size and age. When she was barely two years old, she walked right up to a group of older girls at the playground and started talking to them. She ordered them to "be selful" when they were playing and followed that with a bunch of other instructions, some of which they found unintelligible. The other day she sat down on the grass next to an older boy at the playground and started telling him her life story while pulling on blades on grass and casually tossing them in the air.

But perhaps the most touching story of Constance is the one we learned from one of her nursery leaders recently. Constance has always loved nursery and is now one of the older kids in the group. One of the new little girls was very sad one day and like many newcomers to nursery did not want to see her mommy go. She would cry for a really long time after being dropped off. But one day Constance noticed her crying and went over to her. Constance started talking to the little girl and holding her hand and playing with her and letting her sit next to her. The little girl stopped crying. And after that day didn't seem to have such a hard time coming to nursery.

Like any other two-year-old, Constance is still learning not to push or hit. But it does seem that she naturally has a compassionate side to her. I'm interested to see where this takes her in the next several years.