Sweet Yet Sour

The Empress

Friday, June 4th, 2010 | Anna, Updates

Many times a day I refer to my beloved Anna as “The Empress”.  Part of the um, “joy” of her being two is a very “I am the boss” attitude.  On a moment’s notice Anna will decide that I’m doing something she doesn’t like and feel the need to order me around.  Phrases such as, “Mama sit there.” or “Mama no singing!” are common.

So here is the Empress’ update…

Anna is very verbal, very independent and very active.  She turned two on April 5th, and it was just too close to the birth of her baby brother for us to be capable of hosting a birthday party.  We waited a few weeks, called a few people and decided to have a little party at our house on the 17th of April.  But the universe had different plans for us.  A few days before the scheduled party we discovered that our beloved Cash had fleas, and that they were quite frequently jumping on us and in the carpet.  Exactly what I needed with a newborn in the house! So, we canceled the party at our house and began a huge clean up/flea killing campaign to rid us of this nasty pest.  The myth that there are no fleas in Colorado is a truly a myth!

Since we had already told Anna that she had a birthday coming up, we gathered a small group of family, met at a local restaurant and I made strawberry cupcakes with sprinkles for the birthday girl.

With the new baby in the house, Anna has learned that crying is a good tool for mommy manipulation.  She’s fond of grabbing my camera and playing with it, and if you try to take it away from her, you get this:

Most of the time she just gets fingerprints on my camera and aims the camera the wrong way.  And almost all of the pictures that she does take are fuzzy pictures of her fingers, but every once in a while she gets one that looks pretty good.

This summer I have a full schedule for our active little girl, including a music/singing class on Mondays (a woman with a guitar sings and we sing and dance along), a pre-pre-school class for an hour on Wednesdays (parents do not attend!) and tumbling class on Saturdays.  In between all that we are going to try to fit in lots of visits with Anna’s friends.  We had a visit from Piper and Laura the other day and I got a shot of the little girls hanging out at Anna’s art table:

Anna’s climbing has reached new complications as she is often getting herself in situations I’d rather she not be in.  The other day I heard “Mama, come get me!” from her bedroom and rushed in to find her hanging on to the top of her bookcase, unable to figure out how to climb down.  Fortunately for me, when we moved the bookcase into her room I had had the foresight to have my dad and Mike anchor the bookcase to the wall.  I was Anna when I was little after all, I knew she was going to climb it eventually…

Yesterday, I came into the living room to find Anna opening the back door and saying, “I’m going outside, okay?”  The back door had been locked, but Anna had deftly moved one of her little chairs over to the door and unlocked both the handle lock and the dead bolt and let herself outside.

Last week I was listening to her usual morning singing routine that she does after she wakes up when all of a sudden there was screaming and crying.  Again, I rushed into her room to find that she had climbed up the side of her crib and gotten herself stuck trying to get out.  So, the decision was made to make the leap to a “big girl” bed.  We removed one side of her convertible crib, put up a gate on her bedroom door and spent last weekend dealing with the fall out.  Anna really enjoys her new independence, she frequently gets up out of the crib and plays with her books, stuffed animals, etc.  This is the destruction in her room after Sunday afternoon’s nap:

Monday afternoon’s nap didn’t actually happen as Anna instead just played in her room.  Monday night we figured she would be tired and go to sleep pretty quickly. Ha! Instead, she played for 2 hours and then was up every time that we were up with Henry.  At midnight while I was feeding Henry, Mike went into Anna’s room to find her at the window with the shade up looking out and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.  Adorable, but all that wakefulness made for a grumpy girl the next day.

With her new baby brother in the picture Anna is often a little more grumpy anyway.  She does not like all the attention Henry gets and often tells me to put Henry down or stop feeding him so that I can play with her.  It’s a little heartbreaking since I would like to give her more attention, but it’s simply not possible.  She’s a little helpful with him; she likes to put his pacifier in to make him stop crying, but she’s also treating her dolls like I treat Henry.  She often changes the diaper on one of her dolls and the other day decided to pull up her shirt and “feed” her doll – once she even pulled up her shirt when I let her have Henry on her lap! I’m sure this will get better when I have to feed Henry less often, but for the moment, Anna is learning to deal with the fact that I simply can’t give her my full attention.

But Anna is adorable and smart and will always be my favorite little girl.  Every once in a while out of the blue Anna will say, “I love you mama” and there’s nothing you can do but love those moments!

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