Miss Two

Two at my sister's wedding a little over a year ago.

This is Two on her third birthday. Isn't she just darling?! I miss her little-ness.

Here's the beauty queen again. I love to look at her big brown eyes. Huz and I have kind of smallish eyes. His are hazel, mine are green. One has blue eyes. When Two was born, she was itty bitty with these big, huge, beautiful brown eyes. Our (6 yr old) neighbor said that she had 'pop out eyes.'

This is a favorite of mine. If you notice her shirt, it says, 'I do all my own stunts." And she did. Still does. She was afraid of all the wrong things and way too brave for others. Example, scared to lay on the floor, would climb up on the top of our swing set. In the bottom corner of this picture is our milk box. It has inside three empty milk jugs. Well, empty of milk. Two had just finished filling them with snails. Forty-something of them. Yummmm. For some reason my girls all love snails...

Three and a half in this picture.

Here she is dressed as 'Fancy Mancy' as she called her. Two used to dress up EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Her favorite outfit was always some sort of leotard. She called them ballets. Every morning I would help her dress and within ten seconds she had changed herself into a ballet. I remember the day she came out of her room in her regular clothes. I asked her where her ballet was. She told me she didn't wear ballets anymore. And that was one of my saddest days. I didn't realize that overnight, literally, she would quit dressing up. I was devastated. A million pictures of her dressed up would not have been enough.

We celebrated this wonderful girl's birthday recently and I can hardly believe that eight years have passed. I love this kid. She is the one who is keenly aware of others needs and feelings. She notices when I need help and is quick to offer. When she was in kindergarten, the class was doing rotations and at one rotation they were playing a game where the first person to say the letter on the flash card got to hold the card. The person with the most cards at the end won. Two was not in the lead. In fact, she only had a couple cards. But she noticed that another little girl in the group didn't have any and asked the teacher if she could give the girl one of her cards so that the girl wouldn't be sad.

This girl can run like the wind. She is fast!! When she was two she was running really fast at Huz's parent's house and ran into their fence and got a concussion. That was one of the scariest days of my parenting. Her head was so swollen. I hadn't seen anything like that for a really long time. People that saw her in the ER stayed to find out if she was going to be okay. Thankfully she was.

Two is a lot like me. We LOOOOOOVE our sweets. She didn't speak for a long time. We tried signing with her. Every day we'd watch the 'Signing Time' movies. Over and over and over and over. All. Day. Long. We would sign everything to her. Finally, one miraculous day we had a break through. She was sitting on the couch watching Rachel when she slowly began to raise her finger to her cheek. One and I waited with baited breath to see what she would do. Very carefully she rubbed her index finger into her cheek, completely expressionless, to tell us that she wanted candy. That's right folks. Her first word was candy.

When she was two, I woke up in the middle of the night to a sound in the kitchen. I woke up Huz, telling him that someone had broken into our house. I was super freaked out. He, not so much, but to appease me went to investigate. He called me into the kitchen to see the 'burglar.' It was Two. She had climbed onto the kitchen counter and was rummaging through the cupboards looking for some candy that she had seen. Mind you, it was three a.m.

Two loved her binky. A lot. We weaned her off of it when she was 1. She wasn't done, though and continued to steal binkies from anyone who had one. It didn't matter who it was or where we were. She was stealth. Her sister, Three, also loved binkies. Three's was also taken away when she turned one. They used to conspire together to steal Four's binkies. They had secret hiding places for them. There were many a time I would be looking for a binky for Four only to find none. I could always ask Three where they were because she was too young to be dishonest. She would promptly take me to the latest hiding spot, much to Two's dismay, where there would be a stash of six or so binkies. When Two was five and Three was four they were sitting together and I heard Two say, "Hey! Three!! Do this!!" I went to see what it was they were doing and they had discovered sucking their thumbs. Still a challenge today. Both of these darlings have SPD, so it's going to be a difficult habit to break someday.

I remember the time I had splurged and bought myself some MAC make up. Two was potty training at the time and she came running to me saying she had done it!! I asked her what she had done and she told me she had flushed the toilet and that 'it' had gone down. I asked her if she had gone poop or potty and she looked at me funny and led me into the bathroom. Pointing to my empty makeup container she proudly exclaimed, again,

'I did it, Mommy!! And they went all gone!'

She had just flushed my MAC down the toilet. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. I laughed and it has been my motto ever since.

Another hobby of Two's, in her younger years, was to sneak the carton of ice cream out of the freezer and hide someplace and eat it. Sooooo many times I would go to have myself a big bowl of comfort at the end of a long day, only to find a baby spoon in the empty carton. One night Huz and I decided to have ice cream and the carton was actually missing from the freezer. We knew who had taken it and decided that we would bust her. I had the camera and Huz threw open her bedroom door. We both said, 'Aha!' Only she wasn't in her bed. A few minutes later, we found her UNDER her bed, half way through a half gallon. A girl after my own heart.

Two is kind, considerate, faithful, trusting, trustworthy, beautiful, smart, talented, hard working, patient, strong (she's had a six pack since she was one), loves to be tickled, loves to wrestle, loves to climb, and has integrity. I am so, so, so grateful that I get to be her mother. I am the luckiest mom in the world!

Love you, my brown eyed girl!!