Meltdowns!

It's funny, the meltdowns. I mean, they are funny later, after the molten-down kid is asleep, like right now. Today we had a nice evening after work, played in the garden for a while, came inside to make the couscous salad and generally life was cheerful. But then Nina was too warm, and wanted to take off her sweater. The sweater was underneath the PINK DRESS:

Don't ask me. She looked like that when I picked her up. Apparently she wore it all day. I don't know how it started. Let's just be clear: this is not MY example she's following, with the frilly-ness... and not A's either, just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, the dress had to come off, and OH MY GOD. The DRAMA! Time out. And the time out wasn't such a problem, even -- we still don't know what the problem was, except that it was about closing something. Nina kept shouting "Close it! close it!" and we'd look at the door and say "do you want me to close it?" and she'd say "...yeah" so we'd try to close the door and she'd scream "CLOSE IT! CLOSE IT", clearly not wanting us to close the door. This went on for about 10 minutes (10 minutes TOO LONG, 10 minutes with a tearful child literally lying on the floor kicking), until finally we brought her into the other room, and  I opened and closed my hands, and a pen with its lid, and we finally got through to her that we didn't understand what she wanted. Then suddenly it was all "Nina down the slide! Play Mummy gotcha!" and everything was fine again.

In other news: did Nina make her first language joke today? We were walking back from the car, happily parked nearby for once, and she said "mummy change nappy" so I said yes, we'll change it when we get home, and have you done a poo? and we talked about that for a bit (I'll spare you the details) and Nina said "Nappoo! Nina have a poo. Nappooo!" Get it? Nappee, nappoo ...  

Another thing she did, perhaps a more pleasing example, is to generalize "yesterday" to "tomorrowday". I thought that was very clever, though I admit I'm rather biased. She's also pretty good with "soon, not yet" referring to bedtime. It's been a month or two now that she's been talking about other days, which can be quite confusing especially if we don't know what event she's talking about. Yesterday we went on these little mini-trains, with real mini steam engines and mini tracks. They are so cute. And she loved it! She talked about them a lot today, but if I didn't know, I'd really wonder what "Nina went on train inna tunnel, train DARK, train too HOT" or "Nina did a train, little train wheel around and round, engine, fire engine, very hot" could mean.