Hey McGoo,

Big surprise, but I managed to miss my arbitrarily set, semi-regular post wherein I tell you how adorably cute you are and relate my amazement at how you can elevate angry to a level not commonly found in nature. Otherwise known as The Cute and The Angry, respectively. So instead of me telling you about The Cute and The Angry at 18 months, I will be doing it at 20 months. And later, when you are relating to your therapist how you can only find your happy place by hiding under your desk at work, you’ll think back to this moment and know why.

In our household, your 18-month birthday meant one thing: cheaper child care. Meaning that, instead of going obscenely over-budget every month, now we can just go grossly over-budget. Although the day-spa we send you to really does a very nice job of fanning you with palm fronds and catering to your infinitely short fuse, I still find it somewhat depressing that our monthly child-care costs rival the GDP of a medium-sized country. I guess this is nature’s way of preparing us for the high-priced, private college tuition you will be draining from our account in about 16 and a half years.

Aside from becoming less expensive, you actually have been showing us signs that maybe, perhaps, OH GOD PLEASE, your actual communication skills might be developing enough to begin diffusing The Angry. Don’t get me wrong, there is so much more to you than The Angry. But buddy, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the reality is that you have gotten quite a reputation for using tantrum-theory as your go-to method for conflict resolution. Generally speaking, The Angry results from one of the following two scenarios: 1) You don’t get what you want, 2) No one will make the air stop touching you. Both are equally explosive, and both take a significant amount of diversionary tactics and bribery to diffuse.

Let’s take for example yesterday, when I had to endure an endless barrage of The Angry because I would not give you some of my coffee, and in an attempt at reconciliation, offered you some trailmix instead, only to be yelled at all over again because I wouldn’t let you carry the entire bag around the house with you. This is my life. My life where I do things like cut the crust off sandwiches and bribe you with candy. The kinds of things that, in another life, I would have judged with all the harshness of a person who hadn’t had her will broken by a toddler. Wait, make that a toddler and his smarter-than-her-own-good older sister.

Because of your intense desire to do EXACTLY what your sister does, we have had the volume of our lives cranked up to 15. On a dial that only goes to 10. The simplest of issues – without fail – digress with a true grace and elegance. Which is none. We have pretty much given up trying to make you drink from a cup with a lid. It usually works fine for a little while, but eventually you are guaranteed to get distracted or lazy and eventually drench yourself and your surrounding area with milk, or juice, or whatever other consumable you have convinced us to give you. You won’t sit in a booster seat, high chair or any other appropriate height accommodation unit. Instead, you stand. You stand in the bathtub, you stand at the kitchen bar, you stand at the dining room table. Little did I know that when I requested your father construct us a dining room table with benches, I was, personally, sealing my own fate. Dinner in our household consists of all four of us sitting on one side of the table with you pacing up and down the length of the bench, stepping over and on us whenever you decide you want to pick off someone else’s plate. And, usually you are doing it all shirtless because I can’t get you to wear a bib, and it is easier to clean spaghetti sauce off skin than it is to clean it off a beige polo shirt.

But no matter how much of The Angry you unleash, I can now say the following words: We, as a household, are sleeping. All night. Almost every night. It is a beautiful thing. I am sorry there hasn’t been more fanfare, more ticker-tape, more tequila-themed celebratory dinners, but it is one of those things you don’t want to say out loud, lest you permanently jinx it forever. And this Coke machine, it rocked. Sleeeeeep. No Sleep. Sleeeeep, No Sleep. Then, there was a week, and another, where I would dare to go to bed at the scandalously late hour of, say, TEN O’CLOCK gambling that you wouldn’t be up 3 more times throughout the night.

And it gets better. Better than sleep, you say? Oh yes, better. In the last month or so you have begun communicating with real, live actual words. The kind that the rest of us use. The sweet beautfil words that will form the bridge between The Angry and The Cute. And more and more come every day. Enough, that I have a blindingly optimistic hope that The Cute will become the over-riding theme for all posts to come. And rainbows and unicorns will be the new theme of this site. And all my words both in print and in real life will be shades of pink and purple. And the glorious harmony will reign supreme! Ahem.

To any outsider, it may not seem much. The gist of our conversations with you consist of you saying something that we can vaguely understand, us repeating back what we think you want, with you giving us an affirmative “Yeahuh” or the usual “NOOOOOOOOOO!” For example, last night at dinner there was this exchange:

You (screaming): “NOOOOOOOOOO!”
Your father: “Porter, would you like more milk?”
You (screaming subsiding): “Yeahuh”
Your father: “In this cup?”
You (calmly replying): “Yeahuh”
Your father: “Are you going to spill this one too?”
You: “Yeahuh”

See? Not much. But to know where we are coming from, it is like witty repartee amongst friends. You are at a place now where we can get you to attempt a repeat of just about any word we ask, and I have even gotten you saying “yeesssssh” instead of “Yeahuh” to everything. It is such clear and tangible progress, and something that is helping me on those days when I worry that instead of making the “Bring on the Cute” t-shirts, I will be needing to commission a “Save me from The Angry” tattoo.

I took a couple of video clips showcasing some of your cooler tricks of late, because really, with you, it is all about The Cute.

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