I'm proud of my bad toddler!
My daughter will be two years old in a few months. I have no problems declaring the truth: She is a BAD baby.
She will often break into a bathroom and shove feminine hygiene products, whole toilet paper rolls, or whatever else is in hand into that toilet.
When she tries to put stuff in the toilet, she wants to learn what happens when she plunges a material into the toilet. Some things dissolve and some things just get wet. What's important is that she is learning how to science!
She tries to listen to us coming and runs away to go hide (always the same obvious hiding spot, but she tries).
She tries to hide from us to gauge her ability to manipulate a social interaction or avoid it. She is attempting to get the desired outcome from using her environment for her benefit.
She tears up her pop-out books.
She knows that by pulling on the card hanging out of the side of the page changes, but doesn't understand WHY that happens. She will gladly wreck the book to figure out the magic of it all!
She climbs on anything she can and is often found on our dining room table.
Since she has grown well past transversing a flat surface or a grassy ground, she now feels the need to challenge herself! There is no pride greater than literally elevating yourself from your short perspective! Also, the higher she gets, the more likely she will find those things that her Mami and Papi tell her not to touch!
The more we tell her not to go into a room, the more she tries to get into it. The things that we tell her not to touch are the things that she MUST touch.
This tells me something about her growing imagination. She is already gaining the assumption that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and her imagination demands it so! Unfortunately, the only things that she really finds in these rooms are uninteresting items like pictureless books and chunks of cold computer equipment.
She hides things in her play tent and when we ask for them back, she tries to quickly put them (keys for instance) under her butt and offer us a book or a toy instead.
This is the most impressive bad behavior that I've noticed from her. When she has things she isn't supposed to have, we take them away from her and hide it from her view... and then hand her back something that is ok for her to have. She is already showing that she not only knows good and well what we are up to, but is attempting to mimic this manipulative tactic!
All these things are the foundation of what it means to be a bad baby. To encompass the essence of the terrible two's. Yet I couldn't be prouder of her rambunctious toddler-isms! For now, we just clean up a lot of messes. The baddest toddlers are the ones you should most fear of snuffing their little light.
ps, don't get me wrong. I get PISSED when I find my things in the toilet or 8 dollars worth of feminine hygiene products in there. I have the face of Satan and when I tell her to go, she scrambles. I just think that it's worth the price to have such an amazing toddler :)
I love your family
thanks man, me too :)
This post has made my freaking day. I watched a Mum forcing their kid to swim the other day and he was crying and screaming and she was like 'You have to learn to swim, stop being naughty'. He wasn't being naughty, he was scared because as a child he doesn't understand what this big body of water will do to him. Eventually she walked off all pissed and he was splashing and floating in the kiddie pool and enjoying himself. Again, like you said about the science, he was testing it out, feeling it out, trying to understand how it all worked. Then I saw him trying to sit on a float and being amazed that it popped up from underneath him and he couldn't balance but he kept trying until his Mum took it away telling him off for misusing it and saying 'You can use it if you're learning to swim'. Guess what, not interested. It's so silly to me! I get it, she's tired, she's pissed, but in doing what he's doing, he is learning to swim, just not how the other robot kids are.