So this New Year’s resolution thing has been working out pretty well. Every time I feel the anger rising, I pause and let myself calm down. The downside is that this leads to a sort of bemused detachment and sometimes laughing at (not with) the kids. For example, yesterday Miranda was having a full blown tantrum which included actively trying to hit, kick, and bite me. The old Agnes would have screamed at her and maybe put her outside in the enclosed area at the side of our house. Given that it was 40 degrees and pitch dark outside, I decided not to do that and instead, try to ignore her. Well, that made her more mad, and there was a few minutes where she was literally chasing me around the house trying to bite me. She did manage to nip my arm and give me a little bruise. You can imagine it was hard not to laugh when you’re being run down by a rabid two-year old.

Eleanor has passed the tantrum phase and has been doing pretty well using her words and responding to reasoning. The other day it was raining when I picked them up from daycare, and Eleanor was refusing to get into her carseat. Meanwhile, I’m standing outside getting drenched and more angry. So, I start to do what the old Agnes would have done and stand imposingly over her, while trying to physically force her into her chair. She gets a panicked look on her face and shoves me away, hard.

ME: NO PUSHING MOMMY!

ELEANOR: NO MOMMY, NO PUSHING ELEANOR! (She knew that I was going to start pushing her into her chair.)

ME: (more calm) Well, no pushing Mommy either!

ELEANOR: I don’t like it Mommy. That’s not okay.

ME: Well, you need to get into your chair then.

Eleanor sits in her carseat and starts to buckle herself in. Then, she looks up at me contritely.

ELEANOR: I’m sorry Mommy.

ME: That’s okay, Eleanor. (I give her a hug.)

Amazing. The first spontaneous apology. Better than the first steps.

Miranda came up to me with a piece of paper the other day and said, “I draw cat!”

I said, “Okay, you can draw a cat.”

She went off somewhere to draw while I did some other things around the house. Miranda came back with her paper. She had drawn a number of parallel lines. She said “Draw cat!” while pointing to the page.

These kinds of parallel lines usually meant that she wanted me to draw a flower at the end of the stems, or balloons at the end of strings. I didn’t get it.

“You want me to draw a cat?”

“Right here!”

“Right here?”

I was pretty sure she didn’t really want me to draw cat heads at the ends of these lines, but I couldn’t think of what else she could mean. Just before I started drawing, it hit me.

“Oh! Kite!”

“Yah, cat!”

Crisis averted. I drew a bunch of kites, and she happily colored them in.

Our twenty-nine month photos are up on the site. We still chose to keep Miranda in diapers this month. Eleanor is doing well with using the potty. We were initially carrying around a portable potty with us everywhere that uses plastic bags, but we found that most places we go have a public restroom. We now carry around a kids toilet seat that sits on top of the regular toilet and removes any fear of Eleanor falling into the toilet. We may pick up on trying to toilet train Miranda again this month.

For Christmas this year, we picked up a few things that the girls aren’t ready to start learning. We have tennis racquets and violins. Theoretically they can start learning how to hit a tennis ball some time this year, but maybe we’re being a little too hopeful.

Thankfully, this month the girls have branched out from all-Barney-all-the-time to watching some other videos as well. They’ve been watching a Dr. Seuss video, a Winnie the Pooh video, and a Disney song compilation. Barney itself hasn’t been that bad. Some of the videos we had started with were some of the more painful ones, but his earlier work was not nearly as bad.

Eleanor insists on opening the minivan door, which she isn’t strong enough to do. We have to lift her so she can put her hand on the handle, and then we open it for her. Similarly, she gets mad when she doesn’t have her finger on the handle when we flush the toilet. There was a short period where she would even get mad when she heard the toilet flush after Agnes or I used it. We nipped that one in the bud though: “That was Daddy’s pee pee!”

Near the planter at the front of our house, a snail died, leaving its shell. For much of this month, Miranda would always point it out, saying “A snail! A snail!” Some rains came through and washed the snail shell away, and for the last two weeks she’s been saying “Where’s the snail?” We’re not sure what to do about that one.

I’m definitely late in posting this video. A little before Christmas, the girls recorded a birthday video for Albert. There are a couple of false starts, but they finally get it out.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (8MB).]

Well, I’ve started a bad habit that I have no intention of changing anytime soon. For at least six months, Eleanor was literally eating cheese crackers and milk for breakfast and dinner, and cheese bread and milk for lunch at daycare. She refused everything else. I also gave her a Flintstones multivitamin so she wouldn’t get scurvy, since, if you note, there is no vitamin C in bread, milk, or cheese. (Well, she would also eat french fries, but we weren’t going to do that everyday.) Then, we noticed that if you put food in her mouth while she was distracted, she would eat more things. For example, she would eat rice and pasta spooned into her mouth. Then, we cut up broccoli and mixed it with the rice, and she ate it! However, if she happened to glance down and see the green bits in the rice, she would refuse it. So now, we feed her in front of the TV, and she eats a variety of meats and vegetables, rice and pasta. This is not ideal, but it makes me feel better anyway.

I never make New Year’s resolutions, since I figure, why disappoint myself? But this year, after losing it with the kids on New Year’s Day, I decided to make a resolution: no losing control of my temper with the kids. Now, most people who know me think that I’m a relatively calm person. Heck, even my one-word descriptor in my medical school yearbook was “serene”. But there’s something about having two two-year olds that just brings me to the brink almost every day. I think there’s something about my upbringing (my parents were pretty strict) that makes me think “if I just put the fear of God into them, they’ll fall in line”. This, I have learned, doesn’t work. They get scared, start crying, and say, “No screaming Mommy. I don’t like it. That’s not okay.” (They get these choice phrases from daycare.) They don’t connect the yelling with the behavior that I’m trying to stop.

Now, I know losing my temper is bad, but if somebody like me can do it, I can definitely sympathize with Alec Baldwin and the whole cell phone fiasco. We definitely heard worse things than “you’re a rude, thoughtless pig” growing up. I think as long as he apologized personally to his daughter, then I wouldn’t categorize him as a bad parent based on that phone call.

Anyway, hopefully announcing my resolution publicly will help me keep it. So far, 2 days of not losing control, so we’ll see.