Entropy Lives Here: Two-and-a-half

Oh, Eva. My cuddly warrior princess.

Eva finally turned two and a half last week. This is a little surprising because I've been thinking of her as a three-year-old for months now. Possibly because she is so fiercely in charge of herself. She must decide what she will wear and when her shoes will go on. She wants to play this game, NO THAT GAME oh and how about she'll be the doctor and you are sick and here are some strawberries for you to eat and meow, she's a kitty!

She plays superheros and knights and witches and dragons with Noah, tearing around the house and screeching, and then collapses into tears and cuddles because it is too scary, and then jumps out for more tearing around and hysterical giggling. To put it mildly, she gives Noah some mixed messages about how rough play is too rough. Half of the time when she trips and falls she jumps right back up like a tough little cookie. Half of the time she totally falls apart.

She has the vocabulary of a four year old, she can count to 15 or so, she recognizes absolutely no letters other than E ("E for Eva!!"). She runs and jumps and gallops and is getting pretty good on the small balance bike. She "swims" with a noodle or swimming barbel under her arms, and if you try to help her she will give mommy a small heart attack by taking one of those arms off of the floatation device to push you away. She also laughs hysterically while doing this, and has a hard time remembering to close her mouth when her chin goes underwater (oops). Her favorite color is red and her favorite food is, well, really anything that is mostly sugar will do. She demands braids in her hair, preferably two, sometimes she requires one little and one big braid. The pictures here are from the day she requested a million braids. I gave her 6.

She remains dedicated to her stuffed animal Tigger, and recently has declared Tigger is her baby and goes through lots and lots of play centered around caring for baby Tigger. All toys (or random inanimate objects around the house) have their own personalities and relationships. She runs a constant monologue narrating the stories her toys are acting out, complete with different voices for different characters and often with song.

She is demanding when she wants to be, collapsing into full hysterics when she just wants cheese puffs for dinner and her cruel parents are denying them to her. When she wakes at night she wakes up screaming. The other night when putting her to bed I made the stupid mistake of telling her we would read another book on the couch in the morning. At 3am I stumbled upstairs to find her standing at the door of her room, book in hand, crying that she wanted to read it on the couch. This morning she was in our room at 5am screaming about something I didn't understand, and after a few minutes of back-and-forth she was sitting in our closet crying "I don't WANT you to say that" to whatever I mumbled from bed. Eventually she was so disgusted with my sleepy incompetence she went gave up and went back to bed on her own. Which left us pretty confused, but hey, at least this time we didn't have to get out of bed.