Time is a funny thing. Part of me still can’t get my head around the fact that Juno is three and half when it feels like it was just yesterday she were this totally adorable, wriggly, happy baby. Another part of me feels like it’s been way, way, waaaaaaaay longer than that.
This whole having a toddler thing is hard, much harder than when she was a baby. Juno really was a unicorn baby – slept through the night, happy 99 per cent of the time, laid-back and easy-going. I can look back now and see she really was the world’s easiest baby and we totally lucked out.
Suffice to say the transformation into a toddler has been… challenging. She’s not quite so laid-back these days and is very, very definite about what she want and when she want it. I’m sure this is all perfectly normal toddler behaviour and in comparison to some toddlers, she probably would be considered laid-back and easy-going.
For us though, it came as a bit of a shock and we definitely weren’t prepared for it. I guess we thought that Juno would continue to be the unicorn child – cooperative, happy, extremely cute and lovable. She’s still all those thing but maybe a little less cooperative then what she was. It has been amazing to see her personality emerging and to listen to hear rapidly developing vocabulary. She is a sweet, lovely little girl. (But if you asked her, she’s not a little girl, she’s a big girl!)
But the shouting. Oh my gosh, the shouting and angry tears have started. I do not enjoy being manipulated but there’s nothing we can do about it. Knowing it’s an important developmental stage is not helping. We’re working on trying to stop her shouting at us when we don’t do what she wants but I have a feeling we’ll just have to wait it out.
