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As a parent, I think that one of the most challenging this is to not settle into patterns that offer short-cut solutions to raising your children. I am talking about things like plopping them down in front of the television so that you can check e-mail or giving into repeated cries for a cookie over lunch—not in themselves wrong moves, but a challenge to resist when they are so easy, so damn effective. But for me, the biggest test comes in the quickest form—that is, saying “no”. When Kaia was still pre-two, the word rarely came out of my mouth for, really, a gentle distraction just about always does the trick for most little ones. But now that he’s the tornado of activity that he is, getting into and climbing just about everything, I find myself saying no like I was getting paid $1 for every utterance. I didn’t know that I could say no ten times fast, but it just pumps out of the undulating tongue when you see him dumping sand from the sandbox on the bed.

I used to be able to rationally sit with the idea that I did not want to be one of those parents who just told their children “no” and never offered an explanation. I know that Kaia is able to partially understand my explanation of why he shouldn’t climb up the cabinets (‘boom boom’), and I feel a bit better about things when I do. However, when you mix in fatigue, heat and the day-to-day annoyances of having the power supply fry various electrical appliances and cleaning the washing machine filter a dozen times for each wash due to the high sand content in the water, “no” and an explanation can be hard to come by. There is a part of me that knows that Kaia’s exploration into the more dangerous things (and the associated tantrum when taken away from the activity) is a phase, so I’m hoping that my reliance upon the simple “no” is as well. One thing that I am certainly realizing is that we parents go through phases as well.

Why I Love this Time: Long one-sentence speeches calling our everyone that he knows, “papa, mama, baby, grandme, grandpapa, auntie, baby….”