I’m here to tell you the terrible twos are a real thing. I also believe they continue into the 3’s though I prefer to call that the threeanger stage.
Our first three children never underwent as terrible a phase as our current two year old, but it could be how she is as the fourth child. She’s a handful and gets into everything. And it only seems to be worse now that she is two.
Let me describe a little of what this terrible two phase is like. One day last week, I came out of the shower and Alice is sitting in the hall playing with some toys with an entire bag of goldfish next to her. She looks up at me and smiles and continues to eat goldfish like nothing is wrong. (She had no goldfish prior to my entering the shower, she took out of a cabinet on her own).
The next morning I came out of the room from feeding Bryce and found Alice dumping a small container of glitter all over herself and the floor. As a parent having glitter is a terrible idea but this was in a nail kit Reese got for her birthday and parent fail we didn’t put it out of reach yet.
The next day I again went to give Bryce his bottle and our little troublemaker struck again. I gave her a go gurt and went to Bryce’s room. When he was done his bottle I came back to the yogurt squeezed all over her high chair tray and she is sitting there “painting” with it on her tray.
Several times this week she has torn open an entire pack of wipes and taken them all out. Thankfully we were able to salvage them before they dried out.
She also walked into the bathroom and tore off a bunch of toilet paper and on a different day emptied all the solution out of my contact case, thankfully the contacts were still in there.
She has entered a phase of saying “No I don’t want to, go away.” And she may resort to flailing if she does not want a diaper change or doesn’t want to do something.
And I almost forgot to mention that three different times this week in three different rooms of the house, Alice has taken a book with stickers in it, taken out every sticker and put all the stickers together on the carpet.
So there’s a little taste of the terrible two’s. Let’s hope it’s just a brief phase that Alice will grow out of. Considering how adventurous and curious she has been I am not sure there is outgrowing this phase with this one. She’s definitely a handful but we love her so much!

