Twenty-Eight Months

Dear Persephone,

When I ask how old you are, you’ve learned to say “two and a quarter.” But I guess now you’ll have to learn to say “two and a third.”

We’ve taken you out of the daycare for the summer so you are spending a lot of time with your mother. She took you out to a friend’s cabin in the country. It was going to be a weekend trip but you ended up staying for a whole week because you were having so much fun. But whenever you stubbed your toe or scraped your knee you cried for Dada.

You’ve often shown a preference for me over your mother in moments of crisis. Your mother theorizes that this is the natural order of things, but I think it’s because we’ve bonded more closely over the last year. Your mother was working very hard at a school with extended hours. That meant that I got you ready in the morning and took you to daycare; I picked you up in the afternoon; usually I put you to bed as well. But after a month or so spending more time with your mother, you are starting to call for her rather than me.

We do still spend quality time together of course. A couple weeks ago I took you to City Park. We walked around Big Lake and you chased the ducks. When it started to rain we took refuge in the New Orleans Museum of Art. I was surprised to discover a temporary exhibit on dinosaurs was being installed. There was a huge T. Rex skeleton in the main atrium. You were quite frightened of it at first. I sensed that was because of the way it loomed overhead, so I took you up to the second level. When we looked down at the T. Rex from above it wasn’t nearly as frightening. Soon you pronounced the T. Rex as “happy” and said it was your “friend.”

(You understand happy is opposed to sad, but I suspect you also regard it as the opposite of dead. I tried to allay your fears about the T. Rex by explaining it was dead. No, you decided, it was happy. And you’ve made some other remarks along those lines.)

Later I learned the dinosaurs weren’t part of an exhibit at all. They were props for a film that was being shot there.

What else? Recently at bedtime you’ve been requesting the story of “Sephie and the flowers” — the mythological story of your namesake. That’s pretty cool.

Against my better judgment, we recently bought a small above-ground pool. When I assembled it I was astonished at how well you took to the role of helper, bringing me the pieces I needed. Now you’re swimming almost every day.

You are fully into the so-called terrible twos. You have temper fits and meltdowns on a fairly regular basis. We are learning how to deal with such behavior as best we can. A short time out often works wonders for your disposition.

But even with your bouts of ill humor, you are still generally adorable and a joy to be around.