TERRORIST TWOS

I couldn't write a blog post in the last week because Lauren was acting like a little household terrorist and I was trying to follow the adage "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Thus, the radio silence. Now that we're out of it, I feel that I can write again without saying something I will regret because I have my mommy goggles of love back on tightly.

On one of our hardest days, I insisted that we take a photo to help celebrate making it through the day.

Thankfully, Lauren seems to have snapped out of her funk just in time for me to decide to keep her around. It seems that she likes to work in threes. When her heart stopped, it was down for three days and she's had three surgeries. For new behaviours, it takes three days for her to accept the change and adopt it. When she's delightful, it usually lasts for three weeks and when she is awful, it takes three days of Matt and I working our hardest to snap her out of it. This last stretch of awful had us discussing our plan of attack in the basement each evening so that we made sure that we were a consistent, united front.

How can I best describe Lauren's behaviour? I would say that she was acting like a teenager in a two year old body who had lost all ability to speak anything except whine. So she was being defiant in every situation, would whine and cry instead of speaking, and refused to comply with regularly expected behaviours. This is so atypical of her! She visited the naughty spot so many times that it was like a carousel. And then, three days later, she started using her words again instead of whining, acting like a regular loving human being and being delightful once again. It is nice going into one of these stretches that we know that it will only last a few days but, wow, sometimes three days can feel like it lasts forever!

Oh and you might wonder why Lauren suddenly started acting so terrible.... It wasn't because of an oncoming cold or teething or a lack of sleep. She started because she caught sight of herself fake crying in a mirror and then proceeded to do it in every single reflective surface that she could find. And that affinity for mirrors, windows, glass doors, and the overflow drain in the bathtub took our little drama queen into her three day binge of naughtyhood. I honestly felt like draping my home in sheets so she couldn't get any of the reflective feedback that she so desired.

The one thing that does amaze me is how, even in the midst of her most terrible stint, during our moments of quiet I want nothing more than to scoop her up, hold her close and feel her little body melt into mine while she curls in tight. I guess that's what true love is all about.