Sultanas under the carseat

It’s been a momentous week since I last wrote. Sleep—that sweet sustaining force that drives everything, absolutely everything, has been in short supply (and it’s a fleeting, partial reminder of what life is like with a much younger child. I certainly don’t long for those newborn to 12 months nights staring vapidly into a night light in a zombified stupor). For some reason, Tiggy has been waking up three, four times a night, requiring resettling and crying. She’s not sick, she’s not hungry, she’s not cold. Something developmental is afoot, I am sure of it. Every other time that nights have gone to the dogs, we come out the other side with something new (crawling, nasal phonemes, walking, nouns, climbing stairs, the past tense, jumping with both feet off the ground, future conditional tense, Yo Gabba Gabba silly faces, beatboxing).

Patrice has been wrung out with exhaustion from night feeding, and I have been walking around with flat batteries after preparing for and running the City2Surf (although I was chuffed at my time, about 72 minutes 30 seconds. Yay me) and trying to help out with resettling during the night.

We’ve been having more . . . contests . . . is what you’d call them. Over dressing, bedtime, food, everything (well, everything except parks, baths involving bath bombs, and pink marshmallows). She particularly hates jackets and coats and hoodies, which is totally brilliant, really, with the weather as sharply cold as Jack Frost’s nose. Often she’ll dissolve into tears—great wracking sobs with bright lines of salty liquid running down each cheek, and fall like a crumpled sack to the ground at the announcement that we’re about to don a jacket so that we can brave the late-winter day (or night). ‘I’m a little bit sad,’ she says, ‘because I don’t want a jacket.’ But she gets one anyway, and then forgets that it’s on until we get indoors again and it becomes a puntitive, irritating straitjacket.

She has a fiercely independent sense of will (which, in my weak moments of astrological credulity, I attribute to her Taurean nature), and a toddler’s joyous incomprehension of any other time than the present. She has an only embryonic sense of analepsis and prolepsis. You cannot promise that something will happen in the future, even the near future. She is very, very insistent. She introduces her desires with ‘I know, we can . . .’ or ‘Would I like a . . .’, and if you deny her, she will only repeat them.

Today was a bit of a grumpy day, and a contest day, at least to begin with. We went to the park, early-ish: one halfway between our local fave and the more-awesome-than-Orange-and-Poppyseed-Cake Steamroller Park. While playing near the swings, I tried to sneak a photograph. Tiggy often says ‘Smile!’ as I take one and flashes a grin like a small cherubic sun. As I took this photo, she uttered her customary ‘Smile’, but it was desultory and hushed, and the sub-Antarctic wind coupled with her sleepy testiness meant that this was the result.

But then she was halfway through munching on a Ched, and who wants to be snapped masticating, paparazzi style?

It wasn’t utterly beyond salvage, though. We played some more, made a forest out of twigs in the bark chips, and drew dirt pictures of a deer, a tiger and a cow, and little by little, we both felt better. The best fun to be had was exiting the park, on the chain barring entrance to cars. It was a horsie, and she was its more than willing rider. Peals of laughter rolled over the brisk wind and the soughing of the trees as Electra and Jade, the dollies that had accompanied her, rode the chain with their limbs jammed in the links.

Safely back home again, and with fish fingers, peas and carrot in her tummy, Tiggy was much more animated, requesting Mummy’s prize Blythe doll, Darling Diva for a picnic on the floor. After the picnic, the Diva was even serenaded with the song from her YouTube clip (pic after the jump):

‘Dweams don’t vap-orate, in the morning light, in the morning light, so wake UP! Wake UP!’

So it hasn’t been all sorrows and wrestling. And even the sorrows and wrestling are completely understandable . . . what a frustration to be two!