The Stage "They" Call Toddler Hood

Can't you see the gleem in his eyes?

Then there's Eli who has the innocent look down pat (kind of frightening) :)

I had an official toddler mom moment last week. I took the boys to the grocery store by myself which is not out of the ordinary because I only had to get a few things. I pushed the stroller and used some of my re-usable bags to stow the baby food in while shoving the rest of the things that I needed into the bottom of the stroller. As a side note: you can also pull a cart behind you while you push the stroller in front of you but if the store is crowded this approach is a bit daunting. Anyways, as I am loading the boys into the stroller in the parking lot Alex begins uncontrollably screaming kind of like the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park. You get the picture. I look at Eli who is laughing (he tends to think Alex crying is kind of funny) and notice that he has hairs in his hand. I try to console poor Alex who is quite shaken by his new found baldness (I may be exaggerating a bit but bear with me). As I am comforting Alex I am telling Eli "no, no that hurts bubby" and a lady starts peering at me from around her car. Yes, she thought I was "disciplining" Eli and he was the one screaming. Once I assured her that my children were safe in my keeping we headed into the store. I will not bore you with a ton of details but by the end of the shopping trip we left without Alex's binky that I had already picked up 3 times and washed off to give back to him. I had picked up their sandals no less than 1/2 a dozen time and naively kept putting them back on. Although, in my defense, it did take them some time to pry them back off and chuck them to the floor. The kicker was on the way out when Eli (I swear he is not normally a bully) realized that he could kick the back of his brother's seat and watch him fling forward and then after repeating this method several times his brother would do his aforementioned pterodactyl impression. I was literally sweating as I placed them back in the car and headed home. Score one for the twoddlers (I'm not sure what they call twin toddlers nowadays). I will do it again but I am now prepared for their evil toddler schemes.


One of the other things that made me aware of toddler hood was when Jared and I cleaned the kitchen Saturday. I swept under the high chairs and cleaned under the vinyl cover thing on the seat only to find a meals worth of puffs, cheerios and scary crumbs that I swear I could hear mocking me. Another one of their favorite games right now is the refrigerator scramble. It goes like this: Mommy opens the refrigerator, one of them quickly crawls in front of the door so that I cannot close it and tries to starts removing the condiments (this is just a distraction so that while I remove him they go in for the kill). So as I move him out of the way and close the....oh wait baby number two is now in front of the door I will just move him while stopping the other one with my foot and ... ahhh shut the door. The same thing goes for when they sneak into the bathroom, office, and our bedroom. Twin moms warn me that toddler hood is rough but I thought they were just being big downers. Now I am starting to think that they were just attempting to prepare me for this stage in the game. The beauty of it all is that they also do great new things like dance, and have fake conversations and squeal with laughter and explore their new little worlds. I definitely hold to my belief that NOTHING is as hard as the newborn stage but this toddler thing is no cake walk. So is our plight, it should make for interesting reading ;)