Opposite Day

Living with a two year-old can make you feel psychotic sometimes. Never mind the sleep deprivation and mind-numbing repetition that come along with those in the terrible time, the sheer lunacy of their every-day-is-opposite-day mindset will drive you over the edge. We spend the first year of any child’s life anxiously engaged in the business of teaching them to talk, and then once they can, they use their new skill for the Dark Side and start busting out opinions and preferences all over the place. Which wouldn’t be so terrible if there were some consistency to them. But bi-polar mind-changing is the toddler name of the game. The only guarantee in the whole process is that, regardless of what they liked yesterday or five minutes ago, whatever you want them to do or eat or wear will be the very thing they have just decided they will never do and it becomes a fight to the (metaphoric, hopefully) death. And you can’t win because even though you are big enough to force them to get dressed or eat breakfast or stay in the carseat, an obstinate, hysterical two year-old puts up a fuss no one can ignore. Those little suckers will even turn down something they want--a movie, a story, a bath--just to assert their independence and not go gentle into that dark night of giving in. In Rita D. Gould’s Disney Babies at the Big Circus, Mickey and friends show kids what “opposite” means. Like they didn’t already know.

http://www.amazon.com/Disney-Babies-Big-Circus-Opposites/dp/B000AO2O9Q

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Rita-D-Gould/author/