Mila the Marvelous
Welp.
I screwed up and blinked again. Suddenly, this girl? This girl is 15 months old.
15 months happens to be the exact age when all hell breaks loose, in my experience. It's the age when tiny people figure out that communicating is a thing. While they all go through that process in very different ways and at very different speeds, they KNOW. They know that they want things and that you should be able to provide and why don't you know that when they flick a finger to the left and blink three times that it means they want the fourth noodle from the left on the plate of food that you tried to serve yesterday? You should totally know that.
Fortunately, Mila is doing a decent job of using words and signs to convey what she's after. There's definitely some frustration on both sides of things, but for the most part she knows that saying "please" or signing eat or more will get her somewhere. She also signs or says sissy, sit, up, yes, shoes, and a bunch of other helpful things.
My favorite thing she currently says, however, is "thank you." If you are a grown-up who has not figured out to say "thank you" when given something, I have a 15 month-old who would like to teach you a lesson or ten. Hand the kid food, drink, the stuffed animal she was looking at, or even a rock and she will say "thank you."
It's pretty adorable.
Also, rocks are a lot more awesome than you would expect.
Along with being awesomely polite, Mila is also showing signs of being a bit ... well ... neurotic.
Mila cannot walk past something on the floor. By "something" I mean trash or a toy or anything that isn't in the place where it belongs. For example, her bath toys were left sitting on the floor outside of the bathtub early last week. Mila toddled up to the toys at OMG GO TO BED O'CLOCK, said "uh oh," and then proceeded to pick the toys up. She stood there holding them all saying "uh oh" over and over until I took them from her and put them where they belong. Then she said "thank you" and toddled to her bedroom like an obedient little thing.
She's not an obedient little thing. Sometimes she pretends, though.
I have no doubt where this "can't walk by a mess without stopping to pick it up" thing came from, but HOOBOY am I paying a price for letting that apple knock me in the knees as it fell from the tree.
You guys, I'm going to need the public at large to do a better job of picking up. That shirt you knocked off the rack at the store? I had to stop and pick it up so that the Tiny Human didn't blow a gasket.
You know how you dropped that French fry on the floor at lunch the other day? I had to clean that up, too.
Which one of you threw a straw wrapper on the ground at the playground? That became my problem, I'll have you know.
Oh, and whoever is responsible for the flecks of black that are built into the floor tiles at the mall owes me. Big time. I've lost a lot of time to trying to convince Mila that they aren't garbage on the floor that needs to be picked up.
Still, even with all of those delays in life, there are far worse things than raising a tiny neat freak.
I can't wait until she starts yelling at her slob sister for leaving dirty clothes all over the house.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Reader Comments (3)
Charlie is a tad OCD about stuff like that. Except his own clothes of course. Charlie would straighten up the aisles at any store we went to when he was 3-6 years old. Once in his ADHD meds he stopped being so compulsive about it. Still insists on putting stuff back where it belongs at stores but oddly enough this does not translate into his stuff at home.
That is so adorable! Mila is such a doll!
I'm odd that in an office or school environment I'm like that, but at home not so much.