Where has my baby gone?

Where has my easy-going baby gone? Who is this child with all this personality and willfulness? Since when has "no" become her favorite word?

Welcome to toddlerhood! Where babies start working on teenagerhood right after their 18-month birthday!

No really, I love it still. It's cool to me to see her personality develop- and it challenges me to think harder and to be a better mom. It's not as easy to practice a simple distract-and-redirect(like when she's headed for something she shouldn't have, I have to do something other than say "OH BETH LOOK at this toy!" to get her attention), but it's like we're moving on to more complicated things. Since her imagination is shifting into high gear, we're reading books a lot less because she doesn't want to sit still and she gets bored, and instead we're pretending the pillar for the stackable rings is a tea pot and a round block is a tea cup. And we drink pretend tea! And of course her doll Eric needs a snack too so he munches on a "bagel" that appears to be a plastic ring.

She does say "no" very passionately now, even though sometimes through all the head-shaking she really means "yes." Her food preferences are changing now and this has become frustrating for me since I've tried to keep her eating whole, healthy foods. She now rejects most fruit (even her formerly-beloved bananas!) as well as a few other things that were on our "she'll always eat this" list. She now prefers... well, not much. She likes snack foods...*sigh* all the snack foods I've been trying to keep her away from. And she will usually eat cooked broccoli florets, chickpeas, and red bell peppers- and for that I am grateful! She doesn't usually like leftovers which makes it hard for me since we eat a lot of leftovers around here! I have a toddler cookbook and she usually likes the recipes from there, but the meals take me 2 hours to prepare! Which of course I don't have 2 hours to cook because she wants my full attention. So that's why tonight for dinner she had yogurt, applesauce, broccoli, and a bit of a wheat tortilla with beans. Because she wouldn't eat the leftover Pasta Primavera that she devoured last night.

I love this girl to death. She was so.darn.cranky today (no nap since we had an activity all day) and it was driving me insane. At some point though something went off in my head- grace from God- that this little girl wasn't trying to drive me nuts on purpose (not yet anyhow). She was a tired child and that's all, so I held her and loved her and rocked her to sleep. And I thanked God that I had a healthy, willful toddler who had a bed to sleep in tonight in her cool bedroom, who is developing right on schedule as a 19-month-old, and that loved her mommy.