Terrible Twos?

I'm sliding in just under the wire with my selfie this week. Here I am with my veggie bouquet picked from our garden this evening - arugula, collards, red leaf lettuce and kale.  This symphony of green was so alluring and I wanted to capture it's beauty but daylight was slipping away and I still haven't figured out how to use my camera. Here's another one that I tried to capture one minute before the sun sunk below our neighbor Linda's roof line.

There is something so deeply appealing about feeding myself from my garden, but even more so, feeding my family. Last week we harvested most of our baby bok choy and served some up to Taran raw, chopped, and tossed with some sesame goddess dressing. He inhaled an entire bowl and then, with a total sense of urgency...."more, more". I can't tell you how inordinately pleased this made me.

But I shouldn't get too excited. It's entirely possible that were I to try the same dish again tomorrow, it would end up oozing down the window or ground into his hair. These days, we can barely keep up with his likes and dislikes and I found myself caught in a mix of admiration and exasperation at his amazing, fiery will.  

You so often hear about the "Terrible Twos" and I guess we are just entering into the throes of it.  But the word "terrible" seems to do such a disservice to the awe-someness of the whole experience. I guess at 4:45 am when he is inexplicably sobbing and won't go back to sleep, or when it takes 20 minutes to get one pass of the toothbrush over his teeth, it feels more on the terrible side. But there is an incredible amount of joy in our lives right now too watching his explorations, 

the games he makes up for himself when he has a quiet moment to himself,

and his developing sense of humor

Even when his mood is less than happy...

...I get such a kick out of his expression of self and I love getting to know him more everyday as he gets to know himself. My two favorite new things that he's doing - singing (a bit more like bellowing really) to his favorite songs and trying to interact with all the things he finds fascinating in his books. It cracks me up every time he tries to pinch things off the page and says "Hold it". This is where words fail me because nothing I write here will do justice to the determined way he exclaims this with an extra emphasis on the D and the T - "holD iT!"