Terrible (almost!) Twos

I know it isn't Tobias' birthday yet, but I wanted to write down some things about the almost 2-year-old while they are on my mind.

Sometimes being almost terrible two is so exhausting you can't even make it all the way into bed.

Tobias is talking up a storm now, but he is often pretty hard to understand. He really favors his "b" and "p" sounds. You really have to pay attention to the vowels. For example, "bup" means cup, "boop" means boot and "buoop" mean book. (Random side note, why don't we have a way to write the unique vowel sound found in the words "book" and "look"? It is neither an "oo" nor an "u" sound. We need umlauts or something.)

This happened during a brief "time out" after a serious tantrum.

He is still a fruit addict. Two of his most frequent words are "bapple" and "nanana". Specifically, Tobias loves tropical fruits. He eats multiple bananas a day and I have seen him single-handedly eat an entire papaya. He loves mangoes, pineapple and fresh coconut.

This shirt is an actual x-ray of Tobias's chest. His esophagus and stomach are filled with candy.

I think he loves fruit so much because he has a sugar problem. The kid loves candy. He begs for "canny" a lot. He has stolen and eaten an entire bag of jellybeans. But when I say he has a sugar problem I don't just mean that he has a sweet tooth. I mean that I have come downstairs in the morning to find Tobias inside the baking cabinet and spooning sugar directly into his mouth from the sugar canister with a measuring spoon. I also found random piles of sugar in other places in my cabinets. Delightful.

He doesn't just open the fridge he climbs right in there. I'm pretty sure he's searching for tropical fruits.

In Tobias' constant quest for food, he often opens the refrigerator and freezer. He doesn't always close them. As a result, we often find a pool of water on the floor from melting freezer contents. I'm sure we will someday be replacing our entire wood floor. He's also broken our glass coffee table, destroyed several books and tried his best to lose our cell phones. We paid thousands of dollars in our efforts to get Gabriel, Elijah and David John here via expensive fertility treatments. Tobias came for free, so we figure he's just running up his tab as a toddler.

Here is our poor coffee table post Tobias. We still have the frame. I'm tempted to invite someone over and serve them a drink just to see if they set their glass down on the clear tabletop only to see it fall on the floor. Of course, that would get the carpet wet and possibly stained. Ah, what the heck. We'll just put the carpet cleaning on Tobias' tab.

Speaking of running, Tobias never just walks or runs anywhere. He gallops or hops. It's adorable.

Tobias loves to go outside. He says "hat" and pats his head, then runs around like a maniac. The minion hat is so appropriate.

He is a super active little guy in general. He climbs everything. Recently we went to the indoor pool with David John's and Benjamin's preschool class. Tobias tagged along. He got the whistle blown at him more than everyone else combined. *Tweeeeeeeeeet! Tobias is climbing on the pool railing. *Tweeeeeeeeeet! Tobias is climbing the pipes. *Tweeeeeeeeet! Tobias is climbing on the dividing wall between the kiddie pool and the deep end. *Tweeeeeeeet! Tobias is climbing up the water slide. *Tweeeeeet! Tobias is running by the edge of the pool. *Tweeeeeeet! Tobias is jumping into the water inappropriately from the side of the pool. I promise I was aware of what he was doing, the lifeguard's whistle was just faster than my arms reaching out to stop the illicit activity.

Yes, he is behind the glass in the skeet ball game. He is showing us that we are bad parents, also that we could cheat at skeet ball. (For the record, we did not have him cheat for us. We didn't need it. Both Elijah and I totally got a ball in the 10,000 point ring in the corner.)

Yeah, this kid keeps us on our toes. We took the boys to a fun restaurant and arcade place in Bismarck called "Space Aliens". We were having a great time until I realized that in the moment I had turned my head to watch David John doing the virtual jump rope game, Tobias had disappeared from the car racing game where he had been sitting and playing with the steering wheel. The arcade area wasn't very big, neither Marc nor I had seen him galloping past us but he must have gone somewhere. We frantically started scanning the area and Marc was just about to go search the restaurant when I shouted, "Found him!" He was hiding in plain sight.

He's naughty but he's so dang cute, especially when he's napping.

We love this boy and it's kind of sad that he just keeps growing up but it's so fun to see what he's going to do next. His almost two behavior is trying, but maybe it's not so terrible.